The Dome of the Rock: An early Muslim theological document
The Umayyad caliphate made use of the Islamic architectural masterpiece in Jerusalem to make innovative assertions about what constituted being a Muslim
First proclaimed caliph in Syria in 685 CE, ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwan came to rule a unified Islamic empire in 692 after successfully suppressing a rebellion during which the Umayyad dynasty was denounced as tyrannical, impious and undeserving of stewardship of the religious community established by Muhammad in the Hijaz some seven decades before. One of ʿAbd al-Malik’s first acts to mark this victory was completion of the Dome of the Rock (qubbat al-ṣakhra) in Jerusalem.
The lack of material evidence from the early period makes the Dome of the Rock an extremely important document, from its octagonal design to its extensive inscriptions to its location around a sacred stone on top of the Temple Mount. The building is not technically a mosque, but (similar to the nearby Chapel of the Ascension from where Christ is said to have ascended to heaven) a structure around a large stone that the Islamic tradition links to the Prophet’s night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem then Jerusalem to heaven and Quran 17:1’s reference to a night journey by God’s servant.
Many theories have been put forward as to its purpose. ʿAbd al-Malik may have wanted to establish Jerusalem as an alternative pilgrimage site to Mecca, where his rival for the caliphate Ibn Zubayr was based. A number of Christian testimonies from the early Islamic period suggest that the planning if not construction itself began under Muʿawiya, who was governor of Syria and Palestine from 641 before becoming head of state in 661 after the first ‘civil war’ (fitna) ended. Stephen Shoemaker has suggested earlier prayer sites set up on the Temple Mount aimed to form a link to the destroyed Jewish temple. There was also possibly a desire to outdo the monuments of Constantinople such as the Hagia Sophia. Overall, the underlying intent seems to have been to assert ownership of the Abrahamic legacy, according to the Islamic theory of embracing/correcting/completing the Judaic and Christian tradition.
Whatever its origins, the Dome of the Rock is evidence of the growing political and ideological confidence of an imperial regime that became at this point in historical time more recognizably Islamic, drawing clearer distinctions between itself and the majority Christian populations over which it ruled. Coins, buildings, milestones and documents from the period show that it was during ʿAbd al-Malik’s reassertion of Umayyad family rule that the state began to promulgate publicly the terminology of “caliph”, “Islam” and “Muslim” perhaps for the first time, whereas previously “emigrants” (muhājirūn) and “believers” (muʾminūn) were the apparent preferred self-designations. Critically, the language of administration moved from Greek to Arabic.
However, the point I want to investigate briefly here is the Dome of the Rock’s function as an internal message to the Muslim community regarding faith and identity, articulated via the inscriptions on its inner and outer walls.
The inner and outer wall inscriptions can be summed up as conveying two basic messages: one is that Jesus is a messenger of God, not His son, and the second is that Muslim belief can be summarized in specific statements, which are all recognizably Quranic. These statements are bunched together in the first section of the southern outer face. Here is the text, with their place in the Quran given in brackets:
“In the name of God the merciful, the compassionate [passim]; there is no god but God [37:35, 47:19] alone; He has no associate [6:163]; say he is God, one, God the eternal, He did not beget and was not begotten and none was equal to Him [112:1-4]; Muhammad is the messenger of God, may God bless him”
The passage is in essence the earliest public declaration outside the Quran of what defines Muslim faith. The Quran itself was almost certainly not in wide circulation at this time, but an elite text in the hands of the state and its officers, and some among the emerging body of legal scholars, hadith collectors and prayer leaders. The substance of the definition was that God has no partners in divinity, He cannot be conceived in human terms as having offspring, and Muhammad is to be considered His messenger to mankind, and this definition was packaged in a series of pithy statements that served as a declaration of membership in the new faith community.
The rest of Dome text explicitly compares Jesus to this standard, stating that he too was a mortal messenger of God, but the passage above stands out for its distillation of the key elements in purely Muslim terms without an external referent. Now, during the civil war the rebels had deployed specific tactics of an Arabian nativist nature in undermining Umayyad piety in order to lay claim to the right to rule. Robert Hoyland has noted that this involved other firsts in the development of the early Islamic polity: the rebels minted coins describing Muhammad as the prophet of God and asserted the primacy of the Hijazi sacred geography (Mecca) over Levantine (Jerusalem).
Political conflict and theory had developed in tandem since the first round of fighting over succession in 656-661, which had resulted in the emergence of three positions: the Kharijite assertion of strict standards of piety for the right to rule, the Alid assertion that the family of Muhammad’s cousin ʿAli alone possessed the right to rule, and acceptance of Umayyad claims to legitimacy through the fact of their entrenched and expanding empire. As Josef van Ess has shown, it was around this last position that the quietist theological stance known as irjāʾ (delay) evolved - the tenet that judgements about piety were God’s alone. In other words, the decision regarding the truth of a believer’s faith is to be delayed for God to make upon death, hence the Islamic tradition’s name for those holding this view, the Murjiʾa (delayers).
This attitude suited the Umayyad propaganda line against dissidents that Umayyad rule was predestined as God’s will, thus their piety was not to be questioned. So the Umayyad rulers from ʿAbd al-Malik onwards began to encourage the theological argument that rather than through an elaborate series of tests and acts, faith is established if one holds to the basic statements enunciated on the Dome of the Rock. These doctrinal dicta adapted the rebels’ innovative claim to be the true bearers of Muhammad’s legacy, so that now the Umayyad state embossed his name and status as prophet on a plethora of new imperial coinage, as well as the Jerusalem monument.
In this way the Dome of the Rock inscriptions mark a significant historical moment in the evolution of early Muslim identity.
After completing the Dome of the Rock, ʿAbd al-Malik issued coins with the shahada, describing Muhammad (see name on far left) as God’s prophet.
A few sources:
Abu Zayd, Nasr. Al-Ittijah al-ʿAqli fi-l-Tafsir (1996)
Hoyland, Robert. “Reflections on the Identity of the Arabian Conquerors of the Seventh-Century Middle East,” al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭa, vol. 25 (2017)
Levy-Rubin, Milka. “Why was the Dome of the Rock built? A new perspective on a long-discussed question,” Bulletin of SOAS, 80/3 (2017)
Robinson, Chase. ʿAbd al-Malik (2005)
Shoemaker, Stephen. A Prophet Has Appeared: The Rise of Islam through Christian Eyes - A Sourcebook (2021)
Van Ess, Josef. Theology and Society in the Second and Third Centuries of the Hijra, vol. 1 (2017 [1991])
Walker, John. A Catalogue of the Muḥammadan Coins in the British Museum, vol. 2 (1956)
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Very interesting Andrew. I had long wondered about the religious purpose of the Dome of the Rock.