Archnet: Dome of the Rock (Qubba al-Sakhra)
Aramco: A Virtual Walking Tour of the Haram al-Sharif
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| Source; Wikipedia
Adapted from Archnet:
The 7th century Dome of the Rock is a part of the al-Haram al-Sharif ("The Noble Sacred Enclosure"). The entire compex is a raised mount or flat platform on stone that was was during the Roman period of the 1st century AD) for a Jewish Temple that was destroyed later in that century. . The Dome of the Rock was built by the Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik and completed in 691 AD. W Today the Dome is mainly perceived in the Islamic world as the commemoration of the marvelous story of the night journey of the Prophet Muhammad (al-Isra') and his ascension to the sky (al-mi'raj). It is believed that one night, while Muhammad was sleeping near the Ka'ba in Mecca, he was taken by the Angel Gabriel on a legendary steed named al-Burak to al-Masjid al-Aqsa (the farthest mosque) in Jerusalem. From the rock Muhammad ascended to the sky where he met all the prophets who had preceded him (such as Moses, Josef and Christ), witnessed paradise and hell and finally saw God sitting on his throne circumambulated by angels. The building of the Dome of the Rock surrounds the somber rock by two sets of colonnades and an octagonal exterior wall. The central colonnade made of four piers and twelve columns support a rounded drum that transitions into the two-layered dome, which is more than 20m in diameter. One can conclude the attempt to describe the Dome of the Rock with the memory of the 14th century traveler Ibn Batuta who wrote "This is one of the most fantastic of all buildings. Its queerness and perfection lie in its shape... It is so amazing it captivates the eye... Both the inside and the outside are covered with many kinds of tiles of such beautiful make that the whole defies description. Any viewer's tongue will grow shorter trying to describe it" Sources: Ettinghausen, Richard and Grabar, Oleg. The Art and Architecture of Islam 650-1250, 28-34. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987. Grabar, Oleg and Nuseibeh Said. The Dome of the Rock. New York: Rizzoli, 1996 Hillebrand Robert. Islamic Art and Architecture, chp. 1. London: Thames and Hudson, 1999. Hoag, John D. Islamic Architecture, chp. 2. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977. Ibn Batuta. Rihlet Ibn Batuta. trans. by Said Nuseibeh. Beirut: Dar Sader. Jeffery, Arthur. A reader on Islam, 621-639. Salem: Ayer Co., 1962. Rosen-Ayalon, Myrian. The Early Islamic Monuments of Al-Haram al-Sharif: An Iconographic study, 12-24. Jerusalem: Qedem, 1989. |
