On the walled platform in Jerusalem that Muslims call al-Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, and Jews call the Temple Mount, stand two of the most significant buildings in Islam. The site is among the most sacred, and most contested, in the world.
The Dome of the Rock
The Dome of the Rock, completed under the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik around 691 CE, is one of the oldest surviving works of Islamic architecture: an octagon around a gilded dome, raised not as a mosque but as a shrine over an outcrop of bare bedrock. In Islamic tradition this is associated with the Night Journey, in which Muhammad is carried to Jerusalem and ascends through the heavens. In Jewish tradition the same rock is the Even ha-Shetiyya, the foundation stone of the world and the place identified with the binding of Isaac and the Holy of Holies of the Temple. Its interior mosaics and inscriptions are among the earliest monumental statements of Islamic faith.
Al-Aqsa and the name
Al-Aqsa Mosque, at the southern end of the platform, is the congregational mosque of the sanctuary and gives the whole compound its common name, the source of persistent confusion: in most Muslim usage al-Aqsa means the entire thirty-seven-acre sanctuary, while in much reporting it is taken to mean only the silver-domed prayer hall, so that the same word can denote the whole platform or a single building. Together the two constitute the third holiest site in Sunni Islam after Mecca and Medina, and the direction Muslims first faced in prayer.
A living flashpoint
The platform sits above the Western Wall, the holiest accessible site of Judaism, and the arrangement governing worship and access, commonly called the status quo, is politically and religiously charged; incidents there have repeatedly triggered wider conflict. The site is administered by an Islamic endowment authority. It remains an active place of Muslim prayer and pilgrimage and a focus of Jewish devotion at the wall below, and its significance is inseparable from the wider dispute over Jerusalem.