In 610 CE Muhammad started preaching publicly in Saudi Arabia about revelations he believed he received from the angel Gabriel in a cave. He proclaimed to the pagan-idol-worshipping Arabs that “God is One” and that complete “surrender” (“Islam” in Arabic) to him is the “din” (the law). He proclaimed that he was a prophet and messenger of God. In 622 CE Muhammad and his few followers met opposition, hostility, and persecution from some of the tribes in Mecca and they migrated to Medina. This event, the Hijra, marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar, also known as the Hijri Calendar. In Medina, Muhammad was able to unite the tribes after eight years of conflict with the Meccan tribes. In December 629 CE Muhammad and his army of 10,000 Muslim converts attacked and conquered Mecca. Under his leadership also Persian troops were defeated and withdrew from the occupied Byzantine eastern provinces. Before Muhammad’s death in 632 CE, most of the Arabian Peninsula had converted to Islam.
Muhammad was succeeded by Abu Bakr, the first Caliph with undisputed control of the entire Arab peninsula after successful wars, which resulted in the consolidation of a powerful Muslim state throughout the peninsula.
The Muslim Arab army attacked Jerusalem, held by the Byzantine Romans, in November, 636 CE. After four months of siege, the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, Sophronius, agreed to surrender Jerusalem to Caliph Umar in person. Caliph Umar who was at that time in Medina agreed and traveled to Jerusalem to sign the capitulation in the spring of 637 CE. They made an agreement allowing religious freedom for Christians in exchange for a tax to be paid by the conquered non-Muslims, which included the Jewish population of Jerusalem, who, as a result of the agreement, enjoyed a certain amount of religious tolerance.
The Temple Mount
At the time of the Muslim conquest, the Temple Mount was the site of an elaborate Byzantine church. (The remains of an elaborate mosaic floor were discovered in the 1930s by the British Mandate Antiquities Department).
In 682 CE, 50 years after Muhammad’s death, Abd Allah Ibn al-Zubayr rebelled against the Caliph of Damascus, conquered Mecca and stopped pilgrims from coming south to the Hajj in Mecca. Abd al-Malik, the Umayyad Caliph, responded by creating a new holy site. He interpreted sura 17, verse 1 in the Koran that describes Muhammad’s traveling in a night dream “from the Sacred Mosque to the Farthest Mosque” as the latter being the mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
Abd al-Malik started construction of the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in 687 CE and it was completed in 691/2 CE by his son and successor Al-Walid I. It was built on the site of the historic Jewish Temple that was destroyed twice (the last time by the Romans in 70 CE). Historians commonly accept the Jewish background of the site of the construction of the Dome of the Rock. According to historians, Abd al-Malik built the shrine in order to “compete in grandeur” with Jerusalem’s monumental churches.
The al-Aqsa mosque was built at the southern end of the Mount in the 8th-century.
With the Arab Islamic Caliphate conquest of Jerusalem, Jews were allowed back into the city. While the majority population of Jerusalem during the time of Arab conquest was Christian, the majority of the population of Palestine (Jews, Christians, and Arabs who lived in Palestine were called Palestinians) about 300,000-400,000 inhabitants was still Jewish. A massive immigration to Palestine by Arab Muslims resulted in the adoption of the Arabic language and conversion to Islam by part of the local population.
The caliphs of Damascus (661–750 CE) were tolerant princes who were generally on good terms with their Christian subjects. Many Christians held important offices at their court. Also the Abbasid caliphs at Baghdad (753–1242 CE), as long as they ruled Syria, were tolerant of Christians.
Rival dynasties and revolutions tore the Muslim world, while the Byzantine Romans continued to attempt to regain their lost territories, including Jerusalem. Christians in Jerusalem who sided with the Romans were put to death for high treason by the ruling Muslims. In the 9th century, Palestine was conquered by the Fatimid dynasty of North Africa. The Fatimid ruler expelled the native Christian population. Palestine once again became a battleground as the various enemies of the Fatimid dynasty attacked. The sixth Fatimid caliph, Caliph Al-Hakim (996–1021 CE), who was believed to be “God made manifest” by the Druze, destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1009 CE. By early June 1099 CE, Jerusalem’s population had declined from 70,000 to under 30,000.
At that time, a large Jewish community existed in Ramle and smaller communities inhabited Hebron and the coastal cities of Acre, Caesarea, Jaffa, Ashkelon and Gaza. Under Islamic rule, the rights of Jews and Christians were reduced and they could reside only by payment of the special tax. Documents from 1015 and 1080 CE attest to a significant Jewish community in Rafah (in the Gaza strip).
Between the 7th and 11th centuries Masoretes (Jewish scribes) in the Galilee and Jerusalem were active in compiling a system of pronunciation and grammatical guides for the Hebrew language. They authorized the division of the Jewish Tanakh (Old Testament of the Bible) known as the Masoretic Text, which is still regarded as authoritative today.
