Building of the Dome of the Rock

Abd al-Malik undertook the building during the Second Fitna, while his rival, the caliph Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr, held Mecca. Later authors date the start of work to 685/686 or 688; the building was supervised by the theologian Raja ibn Haywa and Yazid ibn Sallam, a client of the caliph from Jerusalem, and craftsmen came from Syria and Egypt. The octagonal plan, with two ambulatories around the rock and a wooden dome about 20 metres across, followed Byzantine models, and its dimensions are close to those of the rotunda of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. About 1,200 square metres of mosaics with stylised plants, trees, vases and jewels, inspired by late antique and Sasanian art, largely preserve their Umayyad designs.

A long mosaic inscription in early Kufic script around the octagonal arcade quotes the Qur’an, with small departures from the standard text, and gives the date AH 72 — usually taken as the year of completion, although some scholars read it as the start of work; the caliph’s name in it was later replaced by that of the Abbasid al-Ma'mun, but the date was left unchanged. The inscriptions repeat that God has no partner and that Jesus, son of Mary, was a messenger of God and not His son, which historians such as Shelomo Dov Goitein read as a polemic addressed to Christians. Abd al-Malik’s purpose is debated: one explanation sees the shrine as a monument of the new faith meant to rival the Christian churches of Jerusalem, while the medieval report that he wanted to divert the pilgrimage from Mecca, held by Ibn al-Zubayr, is dismissed by most modern historians as anti-Umayyad propaganda. The link between the rock and Muhammad’s Night Journey is not mentioned in the original inscriptions.

The dome collapsed in an earthquake in 1015 and was rebuilt in 1022–1023; the Crusaders turned the shrine into a church, the Templum Domini, until Saladin retook Jerusalem in 1187; in the 16th century the Ottomans replaced the outer mosaics with tiles, and the gold-plated covering of the dome dates from the 20th century. The building belongs to the same decade in which Abd al-Malik introduced a single Islamic coinage and made Arabic the language of the administration.