Researchers
Jerusalem
Jerusalem is the city of the first qibla and al-Aqsa mosque, the third sanctuary, and the Prophet''s night journey in Muslim memory. Muslims took it in 637 under Umar, and Abd al-Malik built the Dome of the Rock over the sacred rock in 691. Crusaders seized it in 1099, and Saladin recovered it in 1187 after Hattin; it stayed under Islamic rule through the Ottoman era and beyond. Jerusalem remains a religious centre for all three faiths: al-Aqsa and the Dome for Muslims, the Temple Mount for Jews, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for Christians. The whole story says more: one city carrying three memories, and the very stones read like layers — Umayyad, Mamluk and Ottoman, with the Crusaders between — and al-Aqsa standing at its heart for thirteen hundred years. Out of Jerusalem came anthems and poems; toward it the pilgrims' eyes turned before Mecca; and there the Muslim learns that a land can be sacred and contested at once, and that its memory belongs to whoever carries it faithfully.