Church of the Holy Sepulchre

A caliph prayed outside this church rather than inside, so nobody could later claim it as a mosque.

historicalculture

A story tells of the caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab stopping at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. He climbed to the balcony and paused to pray. When the hour of prayer came, he turned away from the church and prayed outside it. His reasoning was about the future, not the moment. He feared later generations would point to a caliph praying inside and use it as a pretext to turn the church into a mosque. One account adds that Umar wrote a decree stating Muslims would not live at the site. After Jerusalem came under Islamic rule, the building stayed a Christian church. Early Muslim rulers protected the city's Christian sites and forbade destroying them or using them as living quarters. The church stands in the Christian Quarter of the Old City. It holds what tradition has identified since the fourth century as the place of the crucifixion and the empty tomb.

This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 3 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
He feared that future generations would misinterpret this gesture, taking it as a pretext to turn the church into a mosque.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nearby, on the same roads

  • Gibeon (ancient city) 5.4 mi The people of this hill town tricked Joshua into a peace treaty by pretending they lived far away.
  • Horvat Mazad 10.6 mi On one small hill west of Jerusalem, a Jewish ritual bath was later cut through by Muslim graves facing Mecca.
  • Khirbet Badd 'Isa 15 mi Someone hid a hundred and forty-seven coins in a building here, and the newest one was struck four years before the revolt that emptied the village.
  • Tel Hadid 20.7 mi Two clay tablets found on this hill record business deals from 698 and 664 BCE, and the names on them belong to people deported here from Mesopotamia.
  • Qula 24.1 mi A defense tower still standing here was built by Crusader knights, out of stones taken from something older still.
  • Antipatris 28.6 mi The oldest winepresses ever found in the southern Levant sit beside an Egyptian governor's house at Tel Afek.