Jerusalem falls to the caliphate
Muslim conquest of Jerusalem
The Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab enters Jerusalem in 637 AD on foot, leading a white camel, dressed in patched and travel-worn clothes. The Patriarch Sophronius comes out to meet him.
The contrast the Christian sources preserve is striking: the most powerful man in the Arab world arriving in humility, while the patriarch of the most sacred city in Christendom comes out to surrender it.
Umar is given a tour of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre — the building Constantine built over the site of the crucifixion and resurrection. When the time for Muslim prayer arrives, Sophronius invites him to pray inside the church. Umar refuses. If I pray here, he says, the Muslims will take this building from you. He prays outside instead.
The account, preserved in both Christian and Muslim sources, captures something real about the early Islamic conquest of Jerusalem: it was, by the standards of ancient conquest, remarkably non-violent. The population was not massacred. The churches were not destroyed. The Jewish community, banned from Jerusalem by Christian emperors, was allowed to return.
But Jerusalem was no longer Christian in its governance. The city where Jesus died and rose, the city that had been the center of Christian pilgrimage for three centuries, was now under Muslim rule.
It will remain so, with brief interruptions, until 1917.
Sophronius, watching the Arab armies enter the city, writes that it is the abomination of desolation. He dies the following year.
“Holy places are not made holy by those who govern them but by those who pray in them.”
— A principle of Sophronius, paraphrase, c. 637 AD
“If I forget you, Jerusalem, Let my right hand forget its skill. Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth, If I don't remember you; If I don't prefer Jerusalem above my chief joy.”
Jerusalem fell without the apocalypse its defenders had expected. The world continued. The church continued. Christians continued to pray in the city's churches under Muslim governance for centuries.
The loss of Jerusalem to Islam forced the church to ask a question it had been avoiding: is the faith geographically located? Does it depend on controlling the holy places? Or is it portable — carried in people, in scripture, in practice — independent of who governs the city where it began?
The answer the church slowly arrived at is the same answer the exiles in Babylon had arrived at a thousand years earlier: you can pray in Babylon. God is not confined to Jerusalem.
What holy geography are you dependent on? What would your faith look like if the places that sustain it were taken away?