City of Protest and Prayer

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Holy Sepulcher, the chant of the muezzin in the minaret of the neighboring Mosque of Omar summons all Muslims to prayer. It is customary for both Christians and Jews to acknowledge Islam as Jerusalem's third religion, but also to patronize it as a latecomer. It angers many Jews and puzzles Christians that the Muslim conquerors of the 7th century built their magnificent Dome of the Rock squarely atop the ruins of Solomon's Temple. That Muhammad ascended to heaven there, from the same sacred rock on which Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac, is recounted in guidebooks as a picturesque legend.

But for the Arabs, who shut the gates of the Temple Mount against all infidel intruders before every prayer service at the mosques, five times a day, that Temple Mount is Haram as-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary). Jerusalem—known as Al-Quds, or the Holy City—is more sacred to them than any other city except Mecca and Medina, and according to the Hadith, "one act of worship there is like a thousand acts of worship anywhere else." Although Jews are forbidden to worship on the Temple Mount—partly because Moshe Dayan so decreed as a conciliatory gesture after the 1967 takeover, partly because rabbinical law warns that such an intrusion might unwittingly profane the uncertain site of the Temple's Holy of Holies—the Muslims sometimes feel they are under siege. Just last month, a group of Jewish extremists pushed their way onto the Temple Mount, began chanting prayers and stabbed an Arab guard who tried to prevent them. Nor have the Muslims forgotten that the nearby Aqsa Mosque was seriously damaged in 1969 by a fire started by a demented Christian cultist from Australia.

Israeli authorities, who tend to be secular minded, decry all religious zealotry, and they emphasize that free access to all the holy sites is an Israeli innovation (though Muslims from nations technically at war with Israel, like Syria, are routinely barred). That access was guaranteed by the armistice of 1949, but the Jordanians hardly honored the agreement. The Western Wall, where the Jews had been permitted to worship under British and even Turkish rule, was totally forbidden to them. "The Jordanians even desecrated our cemetery over there on the Mount of Olives," recalls one Israeli, whose voice begins to break as he gestures toward the sacred hill. "They used gravestones to make lavatories. We don't forget such things."

But for all the antiquity of its three religions, Jerusalem was there before any of them. Jews like to say that its name derives from ir shalom, meaning city of peace, but its more probable origin is yara salem, meaning founded by Salem. He was one of the local deities of Jerusalem's pre-Israelite era. The antiquity of Jerusalem almost defies comprehension. When David first conquered the city from the Jebusites about 1000 B.C., the founders of "eternal Rome" had not yet been suckled by the legendary she-wolf. But Jerusalem was already 1,000 years old. And bloodshed has remained the city's motif through its four millenniums. It has been conquered 37 times, according to one reckoning. The Babylonians destroyed King Solomon's Temple of cedar wood and gold in 587 B.C. and carried the Jews off into exile ("By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion... If I forget thee, O