A sanctuary on a hilltop. Around it the earth falls away. Palestinians are masters of terracing; they built Jerusalem on a hill, and so the old city slopes gently towards the southeast, towards the Al-Aqsa Sanctuary, and there the central and biggest of 26 terraces is for the Dome of the Rock. You can see the dome from the surrounding hills, but you cannot see it from the city. Only when you come very close to one of the great gateways, when you are almost through it, is the dome revealed: light, almost floating, framed by necklaces of slim colonnaded arches and attended by other domes and pulpits and fountains each of which, alone, would have commandeered your attention. But in the sanctuary they are modest, demanding nothing, content to be here. The gateways are in the north and west walls of Al-Aqsa — which are not really walls but a porous urban border that houses people, schools, libraries and archives. These institutions, and the Al-Aqsa itself, are charities supported by a vast waqf system of trusts and endowments. In 1948, many of the lands, properties and businesses supporting the Al-Aqsa waqf fell under Israeli control. The administration of the waqf was assumed by Jordan. The Arabic root, 7/ll is to arrive in a place with the intention of staying. It can lead to i7tilal (occupation) and i7lal (substitution). Israel occupied the eastern part of Jerusalem in 1967, and the Palestinians say that they've moved from the phase of i7tilal to that of i7lal. “They don't want to live here alongside us”, they say, “they want to live here instead of us. This is '48 all over again.” q/s/a: to become far. From this root the emphatic qassa is to narrate — and also to cut. A story can cut the distance between us and what is far. Al-Aqsa Sanctuary IN 1187 AD/583 AH A BATALLION OF YOUNG VOLUNTEERS from the Maghreb fought alongside Salaheddin Al-Ayoubi to liberate Jerusalem after 88 years of Crusader rule. In gratitude, the state, six years after the Battle of Hattin, established a charitable waqf for the benefit of people from the Maghreb “regardless of gender, faith or purpose”. The Sidi Abu Madyan waqf covered some 45,000 square metres immediately to the west of the sanctuary, starting at Al-Buraq Wall. It included houses, schools, mosques, bath-houses and lodging-houses. This became known as the Moroccan Quarter. Within three days of the end of the 1967 War and with a massive deployment of bulldozers, Israel demolished the Moroccan Quarter and forced the displacement of 650 Palestinian residents. In their place Israel created “Wailing Wall Plaza”, later “Western Wall Plaza”. In 1968 Israel used this new-conquered location to start digging under the sanctuary. It claims the dig is for archaeological reasons. Its tunnels run under the Southern Mosque and come out in Silwan, the pretty village just outside the southern walls. And there, through demolition orders, fines, taxation and attacks or provocations by settlers the Israelis clear a space to construct an alternative reality. Instead of Silwan, a theme park: The City of David. In 2000 I first saw the Temple Institute's ill-printed leaflets speaking of “The Third Temple” they dream of building in place of the Dome of the Rock.
IN THE 65TH YEAR OF THE HIJRA, 687 AD, the Umayyad Caliph Abdel-Malik ibn Marwan's architects laid out the Jerusalem Sanctuary: The Southern Mosque at the edge of the 34-acre plateau, commanding the view south, and in the centre the brilliant octagonal casket; the Dome of the Rock. From that moment until 1948 — interrupted only by the years of Crusader rule — there was always a bit of building or restoration going on in the sanctuary. Everyone who could, from across the entire world, wanted to leave something of themselves in Al-Aqsa. Statesmen and lawmen paid for wells to be dug and fountains built. Women of wealth endowed schools and libraries, and around the dome sprang smaller domes and fountains and fantasies in stone. Umayyad, Ayoubid, Fatimid, Mameluke, Ottoman... Within the Al-Aqsa Sanctuary's walls and its 800 metres of cloistered galleries, there are seven mosques, four minarets, 26 terraces, 10 domes, 25 wells, 14 fountains and eight colonnaded arches as well as museums, libraries, archives and court registers and 12 schools. Many are exquisite works of art. Most have been restored, adapted or augmented over the centuries. They demonstrate in stone that aspect of Islamic artistic and scholarly practice that we see so clearly in music and in thousands of manuscripts: the newcomer comments on, embroiders, riffs off, develops, competes with, refutes, rejects — but always sees their work in relation to what has come before. One dome is Mahd Eissa, Jesus' Cradle, other domes are named for Solomon, for Joseph, for the Prophet's Night Journey and for the Scales of Judgement. With Mihrab Maryam, Mary's Chamber, the sanctuary embraces the story of the Virgin's seclusion as she awaits her confinement. The Prophet David gives his name to a gateway. The multiple narratives of Jerusalem are accommodated here, made room for, honoured. Every piece is unique; a layered treasury of the materials, the styles and practices of different architects, patrons, builders and periods. Stone by stone over 1,400 years, a cosmopolitan Islamic civilisation constructed a layered and harmonious work of civic and sacred art. Al-Aqsa makes of Jerusalem a model of the world as it should be: industrious, competitive, worldly, but gently easing you towards a space that is tranquil, contemplative, communal and free of worldly concerns. In the city, though you cannot see the sanctuary you know that it's there, never more than a few paces from you, its doors always open, its walls not borders to shut you out, but thresholds to mark your entry, to help yourself shift as you pass through. University, cathedral, park, town hall, school, museum, library and playground. Free, accessible, inclusive; the centre of a world — now, bit by bit, cut off from the world. Al-Aqsa has nine great open doorways, you walk past them through the Old City and suddenly you're halted by an Israeli checkpoint: glass and steel and scanning-machines. Now you're in Western Wall Plaza — and in a different city; a city that's pretending to be Jerusalem. Gone now the houses growing out of each other, the soft-cornered Jerusalem stone, the barber-shops, the bakeries with trays of fresh pastries. Here are new buildings, towers, sharp-edged and bland, made of steel and concrete and clad with thin slivers of Jerusalem stone, stern carvings on their fronts declaring them gifts of patrons in North America and Europe for the Jewish Community. There are Israeli cadets sitting on the ground being oriented and there is a large, municipal billboard saying that this was the site of the First and Second Temples, that buildings on this site have been razed and built many times, and that it is the central hope of every Jew to build the Third Temple. Israel uses Bible stories to destroy Palestinian lives. In the southern corner of the plaza a caterpillar-like structure rears up on wooden scaffolding to attach itself to a high point in the sanctuary wall. This is the entry to the Moroccan Gate. In September 2000 when Ariel Sharon visited Al-Aqsa with hundreds of Israeli troops and the Second Intifada broke out, Israel was quick to interpret it to the world as Muslims objecting to non-Muslims coming into Al-Aqsa; it barred non-Muslims from entry. For the first time in its history, the sanctuary was closed to non-Muslims. Three years later, Israel re-admitted non-Muslims — but only through the Moroccan Gate. The vast majority of people admitted are Israeli settlers.
b/k/a: to weep. AFTER THE FALL OF GRANADA IN 1492 AD/899 AH, when the world of Al-Andalus collapsed, the hospitable Moroccan Quarter in Jerusalem became home to a great many Muslim and Jewish refugees from Christian Spain. With these new displaced arrivals there grew a practice of Jewish residents and visitors praying and mourning by Al-Buraq Wall, and the wall took on the additional name of haait al-mabka: The Wall of Weeping.
In 1535 AD/942 AH, 15 years into his reign, the Ottoman Sultan, Suleiman the Lawmaker, undertook a massive restoration of the walls of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa. When he learned that his Jewish subjects in Jerusalem came to pray at Al-Buraq Wall, and that they lamented there because they believed it to be the ruin of their temple that Titus destroyed in 70 AD, Suleiman had the wall cleaned and elevated for them as part of the restoration.
IN 1967 AD/1386 AH Israel's bulldozers razed the Moroccan neighbourhood to the ground. They demolished the mosques of Sidi Abu Madyan and the offices, store-rooms and archives of the Trust Authority and on their ruins built Wailing Wall Plaza where only Jews could weep. b/k/a: to weep. We instead of you. The settlers who walk into Al-Aqsa today come to pray. Like the digging under the mosque, the construction on its southern flank, the plaza against its western wall, the act of praying in the sanctuary is an act of appropriation. This, in Palestine is i7lal. We instead of you. Between Western Wall Plaza and Jaffa Gate, the Temple Institute now has a huge emporium. There's a viewing platform where you can look through a glass case with a model of the Third Temple in it and see the temple obliterate the Dome of the Rock. A pick-up truck tours the streets with great boulders on its tray and a legend that says “The Foundation Stones of the Third Temple”. The virtual world carries tidings of the breeding of crimson worms and the engineering of red heiffers; stations on the road to Armageddon. Building the Third Temple, establishing Israeli hegemony “from the Nile to the Euphrates” and speeding towards Armageddon may be the goal of ideologically motivated settlers. But it would remain a hole-in-the-wall dream without financial backing. Settlers tempt persecuted, impoverished and increasingly abandoned Palestinians with vast prices for their homes and land, wedge themselves into unwelcoming Palestinian communities and build high-rises there, devote themselves to harassing and terrorising Palestinians. It's doubtful that the billionaires financing them are paying for prime seats at the End of Days; more likely they and the Israeli government are investing in the stage just before it. Theme Park City of David has hardly anything to show except tunnels and speculation. Theme-Park Jerusalem, though, will have a temple and priests in crimson robes and crimson curtains. A sure-fire money-spinner. r/b/t to tie. rabata nafsahu: to tie oneself to a place and a pledge. Study-circles multiply in the gardens and on the terraces of the sanctuary. These are the morabitoun; people who have pledged themselves to protect Al-Aqsa. They are civilians, self-organising and unarmed. Since Israel forbids men under the age of 45 to enter Al-Aqsa the morabitoun circles are made up of elderly men, women and children. Everyday Israel kills at least one Palestinian. Every day it arrests and detains and interrogates and demolishes. Everyday at Damascus Gate you see Israeli soldiers push young Palestinian men up against the walls to search them. Everyday the settlers and soldiers stroll through Moroccan Gate into the sanctuary. Everyday the language of the authorities shades further into Settler Third Temple language. Sometimes a young Palestinian wakes up in the morning and takes a knife from her mother's kitchen and goes out to mount a solitary, hopeless attack on Israeli soldiers. Sometimes Israeli soldiers kill a young Palestinian and toss a knife onto the ground next to him. The language of justice and decency is no longer relevant. The language of human rights is bitter. The language of red heiffers and crimson worms and red heiffers and cable cars and crimson worms and holy package tours is swelling. Here. Here in the heart of the world that will burst. Soon. A longer version of this article appears in This is Not a Border: Reportage and Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature, Bloomsbury, 2017.
