Al-Aqsa Mosque

• 1. Introduction

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  The Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem is a prayer hall of about 0.46 hectares, set inside a sacred compound of 14.4 hectares. Under its silver dome it can hold up to 5,000 worshippers. Few buildings have been damaged, rebuilt, captured, repurposed and restored as often as this one. Earthquakes toppled it more than once. Rulers of several dynasties paid for new walls, new aisles and new decoration. Foreign armies used it for their own ends. Fire reached it in the twentieth century. This documentary follows a handful of questions. What does the name actually refer to, and why do official bodies disagree about which version to use? Who built the structure that stands today, and what survives from each builder? How did a house of prayer become a place that governments, courts of opinion and crowds argue over? And who decides, now, who may walk through its doors?

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• 2. Names and Meanings

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  The Arabic phrase al-Masjid al-Aqsa means the furthest mosque, and it first appears in Surah 17 of the Quran. When that text was written, no buildings stood on the site. The phrase therefore described the whole esplanade, which is also called Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary. Writers across many centuries used it that way. The 10th-century geographer al-Muqaddasi did, and so did the 11th-century scholar Nasir Khusraw and the 12th-century geographer al-Idrisi. The 15th-century scholar Mujir al-Din agreed with them. Three 19th-century Western writers, Edward Robinson, Guy Le Strange and Edward Henry Palmer, made the same point.

  The hall at the southern end has its own Arabic name, Jami al-Aqsa, meaning the congregational mosque of Al-Aqsa. Earlier writers coined other labels for it. Al-Muqaddasi called it Al Mughatta, which means the covered part. Nasir Khusraw used the Persian word Pushish, with the same meaning, or else the term Maqsurah.

  A third name, Qibli, points to geography. It marks the building's place at the southern edge of the compound, a position linked to the moment when the direction of Muslim prayer shifted from Jerusalem to Mecca. Today the name carries political weight. The Jerusalem Islamic Waqf uses Qibli in its official publications, as does the Jordanian government. The Palestine Liberation Organization uses it too. So do the United States State Department, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and UNESCO.

  Before any of these names applied to a building, the ground itself already had a long history, and it begins with a king named Herod the Great.

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• 3. Foundations and First Builders

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  In 20 BCE, King Herod the Great began enlarging the enclosure around the Second Jewish Temple, and his engineers faced a serious problem. The land fell away into the Tyropoeon and Kidron valleys. They answered it with arches that support an artificial platform, and the mosque still rests on that platform. In the late Second Temple period, a basilica called the Royal Stoa ran along the southern wall where the mosque stands now. The Romans destroyed it in 70 CE, during their siege of Jerusalem, together with the Temple.

  Scholars once thought that Emperor Justinian's Nea Church, consecrated in 543 and dedicated to the Virgin Mary, stood on the same spot. That idea fell apart in 1973, when remains identified as the Nea Church turned up in the south part of the Jewish Quarter.

  The wood tells its own puzzling story. Beams and panels removed in the 1930s proved to be Lebanese cedar and cypress. Radiocarbon dating gave a huge spread of ages, some as old as the 9th century BCE, which showed that builders had reused timber from older structures. When the same beams were retested in the 2010s, the dates fell in the Byzantine period.

  The floor raises another dispute. In the 1930s, the excavator Robert Hamilton uncovered a multicolor mosaic with geometric patterns and never published it. Zachi Dvira considers it Byzantine. Baruch, Reich and Sandhaus prefer a later Umayyad date, because it resembles a mosaic from an Umayyad palace beside the southern wall. Di Cesare, comparing photographs against Hamilton's report, placed it in the second phase of the Umayyad mosque. Di Cesare also suggested that Hamilton left the mosaics out of his book because they were destroyed to dig beneath them.

  The first mosque on the Temple Mount is recorded by a Gallic monk named Arculf, who made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem around 679-682. He described a mostly wooden, rectangular building for 3,000 worshippers. Its exact location is unknown. The art historian Oleg Grabar thinks it stood close to the present mosque, while the historian Yildirim Yavuz places it where the Dome of the Rock now stands. Islamic tradition credits the second caliph, Umar, with ordering a primitive mosque here. The architectural historian K. A. C. Creswell regards many such traditions as legendary, yet he says Arculf's account lends them some credibility. Arculf visited under Mu'awiya I, who had governed Syria, including Palestine, for about twenty years before becoming caliph. Mu'awiya's accession ceremony took place in Jerusalem. The 10th-century Jerusalem scholar Ibn Tahir claims that Mu'awiya built a mosque on the Haram.

  The mosque standing today begins with Abd al-Malik, his son al-Walid I, or both. Several architectural historians say Abd al-Malik commissioned it and al-Walid finished or expanded it. Abd al-Malik built the Dome of the Rock around 691, and a common tradition says he ordered both buildings together. The two share one axis. Grabar describes them as "part of an architecturally thought-out ensemble comprising a congregational and a commemorative building". Guy Le Strange argued that Abd al-Malik used materials from the ruined Church of Our Lady, and he points to possible remains of that church in substructures at the southeast corners.

  The earliest evidence for al-Walid's role is the Aphrodito Papyri. These letters, exchanged while al-Walid's governor ruled Egypt between December 708 and June 711, discuss sending Egyptian laborers and craftsmen to build the "Mosque of Jerusalem". Each worker stayed between six months and a year. The historian Amikam Elad doubts the reliability of several 10th and 13th-century historians who credit al-Walid as founder.

  In 713-714, a series of earthquakes wrecked the eastern section. Al-Walid ordered it rebuilt and paid for the work by melting gold taken from the Dome of the Rock. The early 15th-century historian al-Qalqashandi credits him with covering the walls in mosaics. Grabar adds that the building was adorned with marble and remarkable painted woodwork, now kept partly in the Palestine Archaeological Museum and partly in the Islamic Museum.

  The layout was a modified version of the traditional hypostyle mosque, a hall of many columns. Its unusual feature was that the aisles ran perpendicular to the qibla wall. Fifteen aisles is the number most historians cite, and the central aisle, twice as wide as the rest, probably carried a dome.

  The last Umayyad caliph, Marwan II, punished Jerusalem for backing a rebellion against him and tore down the city walls. Then the earthquake of 746 ruined the mosque. Four years later, the Umayyads fell, and a dynasty based in Iraq took over.

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• 4. Quakes and Caliphs

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  In 758, the second Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur, stopped in Jerusalem on his way back from the Hajj and found the Haram in ruins from the 746 earthquake. According to a tradition cited by Mujir al-Din, local Muslims begged him to pay for repairs. He answered by converting the gold and silver plaques on the mosque's doors into dinars and dirhams. Under Abbasid rule, upkeep often depended on the local Muslim community rather than on the caliph.

  A second earthquake undid most of al-Mansur's work, sparing only the southern part near the mihrab, the niche that marks the direction of prayer. In 780, his successor al-Mahdi ordered a reconstruction. He required his provincial governors and other commanders to pay for one colonnade each. This was the first renovation to leave a written description. In 985, al-Muqaddasi wrote that the mosque was "even more beautiful than that of Damascus". He counted twenty-six doors and fifteen aisles, and he noted a porch with the names of the Abbasid caliphs inscribed on its gates. Hamilton's digging between 1938 and 1942 supported much of this account.

  Two other Abbasid names survive in the record. Caliph al-Ma'mun gave a bronze portal, and Nasir Khusraw saw his name inscribed on it in 1047. Abd Allah ibn Tahir, governor of Khurasan, is credited by al-Muqaddasi with a marble-columned colonnade before the fifteen doors on the north front.

  In 970, the Egypt-based Fatimids took Palestine from the Ikhshidids. They followed Isma'ili Shia Islam, while Jerusalem's Muslims and the Abbasids were Sunnis. When another earthquake struck in 1033, the Fatimid caliph al-Zahir had the mosque rebuilt between 1034 and 1036. Work was not finished until 1065, under al-Mustansir.

  The new mosque was far smaller, with seven aisles instead of fifteen, probably because the city's population had dwindled. Its central nave, twice as broad as the others, had a gabled roof and a dome. The great novelty was a rich program of mosaics. They cover the drum of the dome, the four pendentives beneath it, and the arch in front of the mihrab. The drum shows a lavish garden. The gold pendentives carry peacock's eyes, eight-pointed stars and palm fronds, while the arch shows plants rising from small vases. Mosaics had grown rare in Islamic building after the Umayyads, so this was a revival on a larger scale.

  Above the arch runs a two-line gold inscription tying the mosque to Muhammad's Night Journey, from the masjid al-haram to the masjid al-aqsa. It was the first time this Quranic verse was inscribed in Jerusalem, and Grabar suspects it was an official Fatimid move to heighten the site's sacredness. The text names al-Zahir as renovator and two supervisors, Abu al-Wasim and a sharif, al-Hasan al-Husayni.

  Nasir Khusraw visited in 1047 and called the mosque "very large", measuring 420 by 150 cubits on its western side. He counted 280 sculptured marble columns, each six cubits from the next. He saw coloured marble flagging the floor, and he described a railed-off maqsurah, big enough for sixteen columns, under a dome decorated with enamel work. The historian Pruitt reads al-Zahir's spending, during unrest in Cairo, Bedouin rebellions and plagues, as a sign of the caliph's "commitment to Jerusalem". The mosque today largely follows al-Zahir's plan.

  That investment stalled as Fatimid power weakened. In 1071, the Turkish mercenary Atsiz, invited in by the Fatimid governor to restrain the Bedouin, turned on his hosts and captured the city. When the inhabitants rose against him a few years later, he slaughtered them, including people sheltering in the mosque. The Seljuks killed him in 1078 and ruled until the Fatimids returned in 1098. A year later, a new army arrived at the gates.

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• 5. Crusaders to Ottomans

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  In 1099, during the First Crusade, the Crusaders took Jerusalem and renamed the mosque Templum Solomonis, the Temple of Solomon. They called the Dome of the Rock Templum Domini, the Temple of God, and gave it to the Augustinians as a church. The mosque became a royal palace and a stable for horses. In 1119, the Crusader king set up the headquarters of the Knights Templar next door, inside the same building.

  The new occupants built an apse and a dividing wall, along with a cloister, a church and other structures. They also added vaulted annexes to the west and east. The western annex serves today as the women's mosque, and the eastern one as the Islamic Museum.

  Saladin reconquered Jerusalem in 1187, and he moved with striking speed. Within a week, he had the toilets and grain stores installed by the Crusaders torn out. He had precious carpets laid and the interior scented with rosewater and incense, so the mosque could host Friday prayers. A gilded glass mosaic above the mihrab, written in naskhi script, commemorates the restoration.

  The Mamluks left their own marks. In 1327-1328, Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad ordered the dome restored, as an inscription on it records. He also rebuilt the southern wall, and Qaitbay later ordered the lead roof repaired. In 1345, Sultan al-Kamil Sha'ban added two naves and two gates on the eastern side.

  After the Ottomans took power in 1517, they carried out no major repairs on the mosque itself. They built elsewhere on the Haram, including the Fountain of Qasim Pasha in 1527 and three free-standing domes, the most notable being the Dome of the Prophet in 1538. Ottoman governors of Jerusalem, not the sultans, commissioned these works. The sultans' contribution was limited to additions to existing minarets.

  By 1816, the mosque had fallen into disrepair, and Sulayman Pasha al-Adil, the Acre-based governor of Sidon, restored it. In 1837, the Galilee earthquake damaged it again.

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• 6. Twentieth Century Trials

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  In 1922, the Supreme Muslim Council, led by Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, hired the Turkish architect Ahmet Kemalettin Bey to restore the mosque and nearby monuments. British architects, Egyptian engineers and local officials also helped. Kemalettin's repairs ran through 1924-25. His team reinforced the ancient Umayyad foundations, straightened the interior columns, replaced beams, conserved the arches and the drum of the main dome, and rebuilt the southern wall. A concrete slab replaced the timber in the central nave. Scraping off plasterwork exposed Fatimid mosaics and inscriptions on the interior arches. Brass replaced the timber tie beams.

  The Jericho earthquake of 1927 did severe damage, and a small tremor in the summer of 1937 finished the job: the roof collapsed. Repairs followed in 1938 and 1942. Workers rebuilt the upper part of the north wall and refaced the roofing. They rebuilt parts of the central doorways, refaced five bays of the porch, and pulled down the vaulted buildings that once adjoined the east side. In the late 1930s, the Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini donated Carrara marble columns.

  On the 20th of July 1951, King Abdullah I was shot three times by a Palestinian gunman as he entered the mosque, and he was killed. His grandson, Prince Hussein, stood beside him and was also hit, but a medal on his chest deflected the bullet. On the 7th of June 1967, the site fell under Israeli control during the Six Day War.

  On the 21st of August 1969, an Australian visitor named Denis Michael Rohan started a fire in the mosque. An evangelical Christian, he hoped to hasten the Second Coming of Jesus. In response, Islamic countries held a summit in Rabat that year, hosted by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. The fire is regarded as one of the catalysts for the formation of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, now the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, in 1972.

  After the fire, the dome was rebuilt in concrete and covered with anodized aluminium instead of the original ribbed lead sheeting. In 1983, the aluminium gave way to lead, to match al-Zahir's design.

  In the 1980s, two members of the Gush Emunim Underground, Ben Shoshan and Yehuda Etzion, plotted to blow up the mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Etzion believed the blasts would cause a spiritual awakening in Israel and solve all the problems of the Jewish people. They also hoped the Third Temple would be built on the site.

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• 7. Columns, Domes and Minbar

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  The mosque measures 272 feet long and 184 feet wide. Unlike the Dome of the Rock, which reflects classical Byzantine architecture, it is characteristic of early Islamic building. Inside, seven aisles of hypostyle naves are supported by 45 columns. Thirty-three are white marble and twelve are stone. Compare that with the 280 columns Nasir Khusraw counted in the 11th century.

  The capitals vary. Those in the central aisle are heavy and primitively designed. Those under the dome are Corinthian, carved from Italian white marble. The eastern aisle has heavy basket-shaped capitals, and the ones east and west of the dome are basket-shaped but smaller and better proportioned. The interior holds 121 stained glass windows from the Abbasid and Fatimid eras, and about a fourth of them were restored in 1924. After the 1927 earthquake, an Italian artist contributed paintings, and King Farouk of Egypt paid for the painted ceiling. Much of the rest is whitewashed, apart from the mosaics and marble around the drum of the dome.

  The facade has fourteen stone arches, mostly Romanesque, and visitors enter through the central arch. Its second-hand arch material includes ornamental stone taken from Crusader buildings in Jerusalem. Al-Mustansir built it in 1065, and the Ayyubids later covered it with tiles. The Knights Templar built the central bays of the porch, while Saladin's nephew al-Mu'azzam Isa ordered the porch itself in 1217.

  Nothing remains of Abd al-Malik's original dome. The present dome copies al-Zahir's version, and it has concrete beneath its lead sheeting. Domes in front of the mihrab were rare in the Umayyad and Abbasid periods. Only two others are named: the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, from 715, and the Great Mosque of Sousse, from 850. The interior carries 14th-century decorations. After the 1969 fire, people assumed the paintings were lost for good, yet restorers rebuilt them with the trateggio technique, which uses fine vertical lines to mark restored areas apart from original ones.

  The minbar, or pulpit, has the most poignant history. A craftsman from Aleppo named Akhtarini built it for Nur ad-Din, who intended it as a gift for the mosque once he captured Jerusalem from the Crusaders. The work took six years, from 1168 to 1174. Nur ad-Din died with the city still in Crusader hands. Saladin installed the minbar in 1187. Made of ivory and carefully crafted wood, it bore Arabic calligraphy and geometric and floral designs.

  Rohan's fire destroyed it in 1969, and a much simpler minbar took its place. In January 2007, Adnan al-Husayni, head of the Islamic waqf in charge of the mosque, announced a new one, and it was installed in February 2007. Jamil Badran drew the design as an exact replica of the Saladin Minbar. The minbar was built in Jordan over four years, and the craftsmen joined the pieces with pegs rather than nails, using ancient woodworking methods while relying on computer images for the design.

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• 8. Control, Access and Conflict

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  The Jerusalem Waqf, an organ of the Jordanian government, handles administration across the compound. Religious authority belongs to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, appointed by the government of the State of Palestine. After the 1969 arson, the waqf employed architects, technicians and craftsmen in a committee that performs regular maintenance. Since the Second Intifada, the Islamic Movement in Israel and the waqf have tried to expand Muslim control of the Temple Mount by refurbishing abandoned structures. They present this as a response to Israeli policies and to a growing Israeli security presence. Ownership remains contentious in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. At the 2000 Camp David Summit, Palestinians demanded complete ownership of the mosque and other Islamic holy sites in East Jerusalem.

  Access varies. Muslims who live in or visit Israel, and Palestinians in East Jerusalem, are normally allowed to enter and pray. The Israeli government sometimes blocks entrances to keep certain groups out, and the rules change over time. At times they have barred all men under 45, unmarried men under 50 and women under 45. People from Gaza face the heaviest restrictions, then those from the West Bank. The Israeli government says the restrictions are for security reasons. Until 2000, non-Muslim visitors could enter by buying a ticket from the Waqf. That ended when the Second Intifada began, and the Waqf still hopes talks between Israel and Jordan will allow visitors back in.

  Digging has repeatedly caused alarm. In 1970, Israeli authorities began intensive excavations outside the walls on the southern and western sides. Palestinians believed tunnels were being dug under the mosque to undermine its foundations. Israelis denied this and said the nearest excavation lay about 70 m to the south. In 1984, the Archaeological Department of the Israeli Ministry of Religious Affairs dug a tunnel near the western part of the mosque. Oleg Grabar, serving as UNESCO's special envoy to Jerusalem, said that buildings on the Temple Mount were deteriorating mostly because the Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian governments disputed who was responsible.

  In February 2007, archaeologists began digging 60 m from the mosque, at the site of a collapsed pedestrian bridge leading to the Mughrabi Gate, the only entrance for non-Muslims. The excavation provoked anger across the Islamic world, and Israel was accused of trying to destroy the mosque's foundation. Ismail Haniyeh, then Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority, called for Palestinians to unite in protest, and Fatah said it would end its ceasefire with Israel. Israel rejected the charges and called them "ludicrous".

  On the 5th of November 2014, Israeli police entered Al-Aqsa for the first time since 1967, according to Sheikh Azzam Al-Khatib, director of the Islamic Waqf. Earlier reports of storming the site referred to the wider compound, not the building.

  April 2021 fell during both Passover and Ramadan. Jewish settlers prayed and read from the Torah inside the compound, an area normally off limits to non-Muslims. On the 14th of April, Israeli police cut the wires to the minaret speakers, silencing the call to prayer. They said the sound interfered with an event by the Israeli president at the Western Wall. On the 16th of April, seventy thousand Muslims prayed around the mosque, the largest gathering since the start of the COVID pandemic, though police barred most from entering the structure. In May, hundreds of Palestinians were injured in clashes after reports that Israel intended to evict Palestinians from land claimed by settlers.

  On the 15th of April 2022, Israeli forces used tear gas shells and sound bombs to disperse Palestinians who, they said, were throwing stones. Some Palestinians barricaded themselves inside the mosque and were detained. Over 150 people were injured and 400 arrested. On the 5th of April 2023, police raided the mosque, saying agitators had barricaded themselves and worshippers inside after throwing stones and firing fireworks. Militants then fired rockets from Gaza into southern Israel. On the 22nd of April 2024, police arrested 13 people for incitement after catching them smuggling goats onto the site for ritual sacrifice. Three had been arrested in 2023 for trying to smuggle in lambs and goats.

  During the 2026 Iran war, Israeli authorities closed the mosque for 40 days. It was the first time since 1967 that the mosque had been closed for the Eid prayers. About 100,000 people attended the Friday prayer on the day after it reopened.

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