A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Umar signified the triumph of Islam on the vacant site of the Temple by building a mosque above the ruins. In doing so, the Caliph achieved what the Emperor Julian the Apostate (see p. 217) had planned long before: to restore honour and splendour to this long-desecrated sacred site which Christians had deliberately spurned, and whose memory had been so vital for Muhammad. In the early 690s the Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik outdid Umar’s first monument with an extraordinary domed structure, now often called the Mosque of Umar – a double error, since it was built neither as a mosque nor by Umar. The function of this ‘Dome of the Rock’ seems originally to have been to mark the victory of Muhammad’s revelation over Christianity, by creating a building which would be as impressive as anything that Christianity had put up – the Caliph would have known the reputation of the Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, then already a century and a half old (see pp. 429–31).