Surrounded by walls as old as man, a gigantic mosque stands on a small hill in the center of Jerusalem, the holy city of the three monotheistic religions. It is the Mosque of Omar or Dome of the Rock, a place revered by Muslims.
In the background on the plain of Mount Moría is a minor Islamic temple, the El Aska mosque, around which hundreds of ragged and powerful Arabs are always seen wearing robes of a thousand colors. King Abdullah, grandfather of the then monarch Hussein of Jordan, met his death at the hands of a fanatic on its steps in 1951, when he went there to pray in a pilgrimage that was intended to sponsor his leadership in the divided, as now, Arab world. .
Both places have almost mythical significance for Islam. Tradition has it that from inside the Mosque of Omar, surrounded by a railing, Muhammad ascended to heaven mounted on a white mule. Before those sacred rocks on which many meters above rises the enormous dome of the mosque, thousands of faithful kneel to implore Allah, his God.
In proof of submission and reverence, they leave their shoes at the entrance to the four portals of the façade covered with brightly colored marble slabs on which quotes from the Koran are written. At twilight, its gold-lined dome casts resplendent rays of light over the stone roofs of the ancient city, which has survived time and the destruction of bloodthirsty conquerors.
The temple is located on Mount Moriah, whose western wall, below, is venerated by the Jews as the last vestige of the Second Temple, after whose destruction at the beginning of the Christian Era, began the long dispersion of the Jewish people. Over its remains, the Romans chose a temple to Jupiter, which they adorned with enormous statuses from their emperors. The site, visible from anywhere on the outskirts of the ancient city, has sacred significance for both Jews and Muslims.
The patriarch Abraham spent a large part of his life there. And on the mountain, following the instructions of Jehovah who had told him: “Now take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love and go to the land of Moria and offer him there in Holocaust…”, he wanted to sacrifice his offspring. The Jewish tradition attributes the name of Moría to the meaning that the word Mora has in the period, fear of God, because it was from there that the fear of God spread to the rest of the world. Solomon built the First Temple, or Jehovah’s house in Jerusalem, on that site, and it had been designed by his father King David. The Babylonians destroyed it in the invasion of the year 587 a. C., but Herod rebuilt it decades later, surviving violence and the elements five centuries later during the Roman conquest. Muslims hold that the rock in the center of the Mosque of Omar is the center point of the earth, then believed to be flat. Its construction dates back to the very beginning of the Arab presence in Palestine, around the year 638 of our era, when Caliph Omar son of Katab, “Prince of the Believers”, arrived in Jerusalem. The Jews retook the position of Mount Moriah and all of Jerusalem during the six-day war in June 1967.
Since 1948, at the end of the Jewish war of independence, until then, part of the old walled city had been in the hands of the Jordanians, including the Jewish quarter, a symbol of Jewish tradition and orthodoxy, where old men in braids and long beards silently cry their grief. ###
