Al-Aqsa Mosque, on the Temple Mount in the Old City, is the third most important shrine in the Islamic world. Legend has it that from here the Prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven after his night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem.
The Temple Mount is the holiest place in Judaism: it was the site of Solomon's First Temple (destroyed by the army of Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC) and the Second Temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. From it remained a powerful artificial platform, on which already in 705 under the Umayyads there was a small house of prayer, a distant predecessor of the present mosque.
The miraculous night journey of the Prophet Muhammad (isra) took place hardly a century earlier, in about 621. According to hadiths recounting the life of the prophet, the angel Jabrail appeared to him at night and suggested that he travel to Jerusalem. The intelligent animal Buraq (shining, with a human face, "taller than a donkey and shorter than a mule") took the travellers to the gates of the temple in a flash. Here the prophet met with Ibrahim, Musa and Isa (Abraham, Moses and Jesus) and led them in common prayer. Muhammad then ascended to the throne of Allah (performed the miraj). Hadiths say: on the way he saw hell and paradise, then received Allah's instruction about the obligatory for Muslims five times daily prayer, and then returned to Mecca.
There is no evidence of what the temple looked like at the time of the Prophet Muhammad. However, it is known that the mosque built by the Umayyads was destroyed by an earthquake as early as 746. Caliph al-Mansur restored it in 754, al-Mahdi rebuilt it in 780. But in 1033 a new earthquake destroyed most of al-Aqsa. During the repair work, the mosque received important additions: a dome, a beautiful facade, and minarets. In 1099 Jerusalem was captured by crusaders, under them there were placed a church, a palace, a stable. Large construction works were carried out by the Templars, who set up their headquarters in the building. The mosque was rebuilt after Saladin recaptured the city for the Muslim world in 1187.
In the following centuries, al-Aqsa was repaired and rebuilt under the Ayyubids, the Mamluks, and the Ottoman Empire. These days, with the Old City under Israeli control, the Temple Mount area, along with the mosque, has been transferred to the Muslim Awqaf. This means that the Israeli state has given the land and the buildings on it for religious purposes and cannot take them back.
The mosque is huge: 83 metres long, 56 metres wide. It can accommodate five thousand worshippers at a time. Its large dome, originally resting on wooden structures, was replaced by a concrete dome in 1969. The oldest of the four minarets, on the south-west corner, was erected in 1278 by order of the Mamluk Sultan Lachin. The facade of the mosque is a bizarre mix of the heritage of the great Fatimid era and the Romanesque arches built by the Crusaders. The most notable part of the interior is the 121 stained glass windows left over from the Abbasid and Fatimid eras. The drum of the dome and the walls below it are decorated with mosaics, the columns are of white marble.
