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Transforming the Face of the Holy City: Political Messages in the Built Topography of Jerusalem
From: University of Chicago
| By:
Rashid Khalidi |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 Perhaps no place in the world occupies such contested ground as Jerusalem, a city holy to Jews, Christians and Muslims. Jerusalem has been a seat of political and religious authority for thousands of years, and over the centuries its rulers have shaped the landscape of the city in order to manifest their power. Rashid Khalidi, a professor in the department of Near Eastern languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago, traces the messages of the "built topography" of Jerusalem at three sites: the temple complex built by Herod the Great; the Church of the Holy Sepulcher; and Haram al-Sharif mosque complex. By first describing the messages implicit in the building (and in the case of the temple, the destruction) of these structures, he then explores the latest message to be written in stone in Jerusalem: the building of Israel settlements since 1967. |
 erusalem has been a symbol of both sacrality and secular power for more than four millennia. Over this time, those who have been the masters of the Holy City have shaped and reshaped its built face repeatedly to convey significant messages about both the power of the divine and their own power. Each of these changes in the face of the city, in what I shall call its built topography, was intended to serve several purposes, sometimes simultaneously. A building may have been meant to shelter pilgrims or soldiers; or to glorify God; or to house a king, or a Crusader, or a settler, magnificently. But simultaneously, these structures were meant both individually and collectively to convey explicit religious and political messages. They were meant to be "read" at one and the same time as individual buildings, and as an ensemble. |
The latest chapter in this history is being written on the hilltops around the city today, in concentric circles both close in to the Old City and at a distance, where there march a series of buildings almost military in their appearance. They are uniform in aspect, closely packed in ranks, and exude both an aggressive and a defensive aura. These buildings, whether the housing built for the 175,000 or so Israelis who have been settled in the eastern part of Jerusalem since 1967, or official and quasi-governmental buildings, have been erected both to serve these mundane purposes and to make a political statement. Their austerity and plainness against the existing landscape and in contrast to the rest of the city's built topography reflect the very political nature of their existence: they are meant to occupy space, to cover territory, and to stake a claim to land, plainly and simply. We can read them, and understand what they mean and what they are meant to do, just as we have learned to read other landscapes and other kinds of built texts. |
Kings, emperors and caliphs
Some of the most famous builders in history, among them Herod the Great, the Roman Emperor Constantine, the Umayyad Caliph 'Abd al-Malik, and the Ottoman Sultan Sulayman the Magnificent, have adorned Jerusalem with major structures. These were intended for purposes of governance, or worship, or healing, and also to convey a variety of messages. A number of powerful movements, dynasties and empires--the Crusades, the Mamelukes, the British Empire and the Zionist movement for example--have also made their mark on the face of the city. Traces of some of these "texts" which they commissioned or inspired (most often in the local pale golden Jerusalem stone) on the city's built topography, can still be read today on the city's skyline, in its streets, or beneath some of its many archaeological strata. |
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| The Western Wall is situated just meters from the Dome of the Rock. | |
We know something, and sometimes only very little, of what Jerusalem may have looked like in earlier ages. Archaeology has given us a plethora of incomplete evidence, much of it in the form of jumbled fragments of stone and pot-shards. Ancient manuscripts and other documentary sources have given us more fragments, glimpses and contradictory accounts. All of this data has been elaborated by archaeologists, historians and others into a picture of the built topography of Jerusalem and its physical aspects in various periods. Sometimes these elaborations, driven by an overt or covert nationalist or religious agenda, have been fantastic, bordering on the absurd. An example of the latter is a huge model purporting to represent Herod's Temple, which emerges hourly before the dazzled eyes of foreign tourists from beneath models of the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock--the monumental structures which for the past 1,300 years have adorned the Haram al-Sharif. This display takes place in a large room (probably of Umayyad or Mameluke provenance, although that is never mentioned to the tourists) in the tunnel opened by the Israeli authorities only meters away from the site of the Western Wall of the Temple enclosure, immediately adjacent to the Haram itself. |
At other times, these glimpses of what the face of Jerusalem might have looked like in the past have been reasonably sober, although we have no way of assuring that even the more sober visions are indeed accurate. What check, after all, do we have on the accuracy of an ancient text like the Bible which can be utilized as a historical source only with the greatest of care? How can we assess the accounts of eye-witnesses from many centuries ago like Josephus, or Bishop Arculfus, or Nasir Khosrau, or Mujir al-Din? And if these are a sampling of our documentary sources, how can we trust the archaeological sources, when only a tiny portion of Jerusalem's surface has been seriously and scientifically excavated, and only a fragment of the results of these excavations has so far been published? |
Nevertheless, in the work of Oleg Grabar, Michael Hamilton Burgoyne, Meir Ben Dov, Danny Bahat and a few others, we can find some images of what Jerusalem might have looked like at different times in the past. The best of this work, notably that of Grabar and Burgoyne, tries to visualize, demonstrate and explain what different rulers and different regimes in Jerusalem intended to show via the interaction between the built topography of the city, which they could in large part control, and the physical topography of the city, which they either could not control, or could only control in some measure. We find in their work maps, drawings, photographs of still existing buildings and of archaeological remains, as well as striking and innovative computer models in Grabar's The Shape of the Holy, from which we can try to picture the aspect which the built topography of Jerusalem may have presented to the viewer in different eras. Much of the discussion in this section is based upon the scholarship of these four authors. |
It is apparent from this body of work that the greatest rulers and most powerful regimes tried to master some of the elements of Jerusalem's physical topography with their building projects, and were attracted in particular to the many high points in this city of many hills. Thus, it is clear that Herod and probably other builders before him, although limited by the topography of Mount Moriah, nevertheless flattened it and extended it by creating the spacious level platform which was the basis for the Haram al-Sharif as we see it today. We can see the vast nature of the task which Herod set himself by examining the massive surviving retaining walls of this platform, part of which today constitutes the Western Wall. Herod did more than locate a place of worship on top of a mountain, which the Bible tells us had in any case been done by David, Solomon and others before him: he went beyond that, capping the mountain with his massive, flat rectangular enclosure, and topping that with a great box-like temple. |
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| The Church of the Holy Sepulcher. | |
Similarly, in the fourth century the Holy Sepulcher (then called the Martyrium) was placed atop the site which the Emperor Constantine, inspired by the discoveries of his mother the Empress Helena while on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, believed to be the hill of Golgotha. That structure and its successors for several centuries dominated the city from its western side. Here too, a building encompassed and capped a hill-top, and from it dominated the surroundings. |
A few centuries later, in 692, Abd al-Malik and his son al-Walid, two of the greatest builders in Islamic history, picked up where Herod had left off in reshaping the physical topography of the city. They rebuilt and extended the great platform which he had constructed for the enclosure of his temple, erecting on it the Dome of the Rock and a much-expanded and more magnificent al-Aqsa Mosque: one considerably larger than the quite impressive structure we see today. To the south they built a series of great multi-story buildings whose existence was unsuspected until the recent excavations, and whose purpose can only be surmised at, but which added greatly to the bulk of the hill on whose side they were built. |
Each of these three major changes in the built topography of Jerusalem of course had profound religious significance, linked to the central religious project of each of the three Abrahamic faiths. But they also had potent political implications. Thus Herod built his Temple, presumably where Solomon had built before him, in order not only to draw on and emphasize the sacrality of a site already ancient in his time, but also to emphasize his power and the glory of his reign. It is worth noting that while Herod's Temple must have been an imposing sight, if the truly impressive retaining walls of its enclosure which we can still see both above and below the ground today are any indication, that was not all Herod built in Jerusalem. He also built a massive fortress (the "Antonia") north of the temple, and a palace on the western side of the city crowned with three great towers. According to Josephus, one of our prime sources for what Jerusalem looked like in this period, these were in some respects more impressive than the Temple itself. We know that the Romans were deeply impressed by the fortifications of the palace: Titus, who destroyed the Temple and much else in Jerusalem, retained some of these great towers and reused them. |
Similarly, the Holy Sepulcher was meant both to emphasize the sacrality of the site where Jesus was crucified, and the political supremacy of a Christian power over the city of Jesus' passion and crucifixion, a city which had been the spiritual and political capital of the Jews. The sharp contrast between the magnificence of the Holy Sepulcher and the barren devastation at the former site of the Temple was meant to stress that Jerusalem was now the city of the followers of Jesus and no longer that of the Jews, whose holy site was purposely kept in ruins, and who were banned from entering the city. During the three Christian centuries from the time of Constantine to the Islamic conquest, the built topography of the city was dominated at four of its highest points by grand Christian monuments. These were the Holy Sepulcher, the great Nea Church built by the Emperor Justinian, which stood at the southern end of what is today the Jewish Quarter until destroyed by a massive earthquake, the Church of the Dormition on Mount Zion, and the Church of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives. |
Beyond a triumphant proclamation of the victory of the new faith, the visual impact of these structures in contrast with the desolation of the temple precinct must have been meant to emphasize the supremacy of Christianity over Judaism. This powerful visual message--our high places are sumptuously built and glow with light, while yours are dark and desolate--was clearly meant to complement the harsh Roman-Byzantine restrictions on Jewish residence in Jerusalem, and on prayer on or near the Temple Mount. While Christian ritual in Jerusalem was often celebratory in nature, that of the Jews in the centuries after the destruction of Herod's Temple had the character of lamentation for past glories. |
The new Muslim rulers of Jerusalem chose somewhat different means of achieving the same objectives of asserting their political dominance and stressing the supremacy of their faith than those who came before them. They did not lay waste or take over the sacred sites of their defeated Christian. Nor did they initially try to construct structures to rival the Christian ones on the high points in and around Jerusalem, although mosques were eventually built near some of these Christian sites. Instead, from very soon after their conquest of the city, probably immediately afterwards, the early Muslims began veneration of an entirely different site: the long-abandoned platform of Herod's temple. The accounts of precisely how and when this happened are contradictory, but it appears that some time after the city fell to the Muslims in 637 or early 638 the second Caliph, 'Umar ibn al-Khattab, visited the city, identified the deserted former site of the Temple, and fixed it as a place of Muslim worship. A simple mosque was soon thereafter erected at the southern end of the Herodian platform. This came to be called al-Aqsa, in reference to the Prophet's night journey reported in the Qur'an [17:1] from Mecca to "the farthest [al-aqsa] mosque." |
Many of Umar's successors strengthened the Muslim connection with this site, including the first Umayyad caliph, Mu'awiyya. One of the most astute political leaders of his time, Mu'awiyya ceremonially received the allegiance of the leaders of the Muslim community to him as caliph in Jerusalem in 661, probably in the Haram al-Sharif, thereby according to Grabar establishing "the precedent of identifying Jerusalem with the legitimization of authority, above and beyond whatever pious meanings were involved with the city." |
What the Muslims did in the first six decades of their rule over Jerusalem was to take the city over politically and religiously by changing its built topography. It is important to understand that they were doing so in the context of a city the great majority of whose population was and long remained Christian. |
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| The Dome of the Rock. | |
The skilled builders who did the bidding of 'Abd al-Malik and al-Walid in effect topped off Mount Moriah as had their Herodian predecessors, but gave it a different appearance, to convey a different message. Complementing the octagonal body of the building with a huge dome, the whole on a raised platform above the rest of the Haram, it was as if they had built graduated steps up towards God, a sort of man-made mountain at the already sacred site of the peak of Mount Moriah. The golden dome reflected the bright light of the sun in such a way that it could be seen all over the city and from a great distance away. Looked at particularly from the Mount of Olives to the East or from the south, the ensemble spoke both of man's efforts to glorify God, and of the political power, the flawless sense of design, and the wealth of those who had commanded the erection of these wondrous buildings. Seen from there and from elsewhere, they can still produce the effect of wonder on the viewer. |
Beyond the Muslims themselves, and others who could be induced to join the new Islamic community, the primary intended recipients of this message were the Christians. This can be seen clearly from the original inscriptions, most of them Quranic in origin, which are still clearly visible in the midst of the beautiful floral mosaics within the Dome of the Rock. The over 240 meters of inscriptions have been carefully analyzed by a number of scholars, most recently Grabar, who shows that they were meant to convey a powerful monotheistic anti-trinitarian message directed largely at those from whom the Muslims had wrested the city and who were still their main political and religious adversaries. Interestingly, there is evidence that at this time the Jews, whom the Muslim conquerors had allowed to return to Jerusalem whence they had been expelled by Titus 600 years before, did not look unfavorably on the Muslim reverence for their own holiest site. The Jews welcomed the Muslims, just as they had a few decades earlier hailed the temporary victories of the Persians over their Roman-Byzantine-Christian persecutors. Within a few years, the victory of the Muslims was memorialized in stone on a site purposely left barren by the Byzantines as a mark of their paramountcy over the Jews. Now, these sumptuous and striking new buildings on the same site constituted a resounding affirmation both of the triumph of Islam and of the strength and stability of the Umayyad dynasty. |
Reading the modern message
In the panorama of Jerusalem today, numerous contrasts leap to the eye. Perhaps the most striking is that between the usually blue sky and the light-colored local stone of which Jerusalem has always been built, and which has always reflected the bright sun, luminating holy areas like the Haram al-Sharif. |
But there is another contrast which is immediately apparent to the viewer today. This is the troubling disjuncture between the older structures in the city, in particular the traditional Islamic fabric of the built topography of the Old City, surrounded by superb walls built in the sixteenth century by the greatest of the Ottoman Sultans, Sulayman, and the newer, mainly Israeli, modern buildings which march along the hilltops on the horizon. |
Among the graceful villas, government and commercial structures, and apartment buildings outside the walls in Arab neighborhoods like Shaykh Jarrah, Ras al-'Amud and Silwan, formerly Arab neighborhoods like Talbiyya, Baq'a and Qatamon, and in the many older Jewish neighborhoods to the west and north-west of the Old City, there are certainly a number of indifferent, undistinguished, and unimpressive pieces of architecture. But by their generally modest height (few are over two or three stories high), their use of rough or finished stone in traditional ways, and their responsiveness to the terrain, these buildings seem to have an integral connection with the rectangular medieval Old City which is at the core of Jerusalem. |
None of this is true of the structures erected by Israel since 1967, especially the residential areas for Israelis--called settlements by the Arabs and neighborhoods by the Israelis--built in the Arab Eastern sector of Jerusalem, and it is here that the disjuncture is most apparent. These buildings are quite unlike any of those we have just been talking about, most of which seem to have an organic relation to their environment. Instead, some of these new structures look like sentries, some like watchtowers, and others like fortresses, set off sharply from the terrain on which they stand. They loom on the horizon, massive, bulky and square, filling space and covering land, often giving the impression of having been dropped onto their sites with no respect for the topography, except for careful attention to the need to be high up, defensible, and in a strategic position. |
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| The Western Wall. | |
The contrast could not be plainer with such architectural gems as the city walls built by Sultan Sulayman, and the Haram al-Sharif and the buildings it contains. This is a contrast between on the one hand an adornment which is meant to attract people, whether adornment of the landscape with a built topography, or the adornment of specific buildings, and on the other a military austerity, a stark plainness, and a dullness which are manifestly repellent. In fact, in all that Israel has done in East Jerusalem since 1967, perhaps only in three areas can one feel any sense of adornment and an attempt to please the senses rather than the dour and cold efficiency of superior power and strategic necessity. These are the gardens and walks around the newly revealed walls of the Old City; the Western Wall plaza, whose austerity is stark indeed, but nevertheless moving beneath the huge and impressive bulk of the Western Wall of the Herodian temple enclosure; and in parts of the renovated Jewish Quarter, with its newly paved streets, archeological discoveries and meticulous appearance. |
By contrast, reading the built topography of the Israeli settlement project to the east, north, and south of the Old City in the areas of Jerusalem annexed after 1967, it is clear that several messages are being conveyed by these new buildings, which are often hideously ugly, with little or no attempt at adornment. The first is that they represent a project which has no respect for place, no sensitivity to the traditions of local architecture, and little concern for the cumulative impact of its energetic efforts on the built topography of the landscape. The Israeli ethos has always gloried in the feats of man over nature, and in man's ability to conquer the environment. |
Of course there are significant differences in the ways in which Israelis view the topography of the country. There is a indeed a deep divide at the heart of the Zionist project in Palestine, between those who almost mystically revere the land and its connections with the epochal events of Jewish history, and want to preserve it (although they are generally blind to the existence of the Palestinians who have lived on that land for generations and to what they have created), and those who want to master the land, as part of the physical manifestation of their triumph over the Palestinian people who live or have lived on it. The archaeologists and those responsible for the so-called "Green Zones," in which construction is forbidden, belong to the one camp, and the settlers, the builders and the planners of the expansion of settlement to the other. |
In assessing the impact of the changes wrought since 1967 at the Western Wall plaza and in the adjacent Jewish Quarter, and attempting to "read" the ensemble, it must be said that although one effect is an affirmation of the Israeli and Jewish presence in Jerusalem, if need be at the expense of the presence of others, there is less of a disjuncture with the fabric of the Old City which surrounds them than in much else the Israelis state has done in and around Jerusalem since 1967. It is true that some of the newer buildings in the Jewish Quarter, with their bulk and fortress-like aspect, are jarring to the eye. But elsewhere there have been sensitive renovations of old structures (some dating to well before the Jewish Quarter was established in this area sometime during the Ottoman period, probably the sixteenth or seventeenth century), and some of the new construction is not out of place in the Old City, where most existing structures are at least 400-500 years old. |
Similarly, the exposure of the Western Wall, which was part of the enclosure of Herod's temple, also serves to expose part of the enclosure of the Haram al-Sharif. Just as the newly visible expanse of wall serves powerfully to remind the viewer of the memory of the one, so does it accentuate for the same viewer the powerful impression of the existing structures in the other. In sum, the contrast between the aspect of the Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall plaza and the primarily Islamic fagade of the city is not so great as to be jarring, and in some respects even enhances it. The same sadly cannot be said about most of the rest of what has been done by Israel to the built topography in its occupation of East Jerusalem since 1967. |
What Israel has succeeded in doing via its conquest and annexation of East Jerusalem and its subsequent building of a ring of stone around the city is to follow the precedent set first for the Muslims by the Caliph Mu'awiyya, and in earlier ages by Roman and Byzantine emperors, by Herod, and probably by King Solomon before them: that "of identifying Jerusalem with the legitimization of authority, above and beyond whatever pious meanings were involved with the city." Israel has successfully done that by using its power to invest not just in propaganda, the promotion of tourism, and myriad means of emphasizing its authority in the country via its control of Jerusalem. Beyond all of this, it has used that power to shape the city's built topography as a powerful and lasting symbol of its exclusive political authority in Jerusalem. |
If the Palestinians are to dispute this exclusivity, and to have a chance of claiming their rightful share of Jerusalem, they will of course need more power than they have today. But if they are to be successful they will have to use that power--and can indeed even now utilize the extensive assets they currently control, for example via the wholesale renovation and preservation of the many hundreds of ancient Arab-owned buildings within the Old City--to legitimize their authority and their standing in the same way as have all the preceding regimes which have made a lasting mark in Jerusalem: they will have to do this by writing on the landscape in stone, in buildings, and thereby affecting the built topography of this ancient city. |
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