Preface & Acknowledgments

Grabar, Oleg

Save Cite Share

Free

Preface & Acknowledgments

Oleg Grabar

The Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem

This book is the result of a passionate fascination with the Old City of Jerusalem which began more than forty years ago. In 1953 I was appointed Fellow of the American School of Oriental Research (now the Albright Institute) in Jerusalem. In early September of that year, my wife, Terry, and I disembarked in Beirut from the small Greek boat which had...

Author

Oleg Grabar

PublisherPrinceton University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-100038

Preface & Acknowledgments

This book is the result of a passionate fascination with the Old City of Jerusalem which began more than forty years ago. In 1953 I was appointed Fellow of the American School of Oriental Research (now the Albright Institute) in Jerusalem. In early September of that year, my wife, Terry, and I disembarked in Beirut from the small Greek boat which had carried us across the Mediterranean. We must have arrived fairly early in the morning, since three separate taxi-services brought us that very evening to Jerusalem, via Damascus and Amman. The vision of the walls of the city unencumbered by buildings as the road turned away from Bethany is still imprinted in my memory, the Dome of the Rock is still vaguely grey and worn by age rather than shining gold like the top of a new gift box.

I was at that time working on other matters, particularly the remains from the Umayyad palace at Khirbat al-Mafjar, but, quite regularly, I began to walk through the Old City, to read about the medieval history of the city, and to accumulate data of all sorts, eventually to publish a study on the Dome of the Rock that remained for years a sort of “counter-cultural” explanation of the building. Thus my first thanks go to those who made that academic year 1953–54 possible and exhilarating: Karl Kraeling, Henry Detweiler, and James Muilenberg, long deceased by now, who accepted and encouraged a non-biblical student in an institution where the time of Christ was judged almost contemporary; Frank and Betty Ann Cross, who have remained close friends for all these years, who introduced me to Melville and to theology, who were always willing to discuss Dostoevski or the inevitability of biting flies on all Umayyad sites; Ivan Kaufmann, with whom we took so many trips and who liked to read contemporary poetry while burning incense; Yusuf Sa’ad, the keeper of treasures at the Palestine Archaeological Museum (now the Rockefeller Museum), who helped me find my way in the archives of the Museum during a cold winter when I learned to read and write with gloves on; Awni Dajani, a member of a huge Palestinian family with relatives from Toronto to Damascus (all acknowledged cousins), then Inspector of Antiquities in Jerusalem, with whom I explored the hidden worlds buried to the west of the Haram al-Sharif; Dorothy Garrod, the gentle and celebrated prehistorian who introduced us, poor graduate students, to the joys of Latrun sherry; the very first team of researchers on the Dead Sea scrolls led by the luminous Père Roland de Vaux; the Musa Nasser family who had just transformed their private secondary school in Bir Zeit into a junior college where my wife found a job teaching English to the first freshman class; and an assorted mosaic of people never encountered in one’s usual habitat: patriarchs of many varieties of Christianity, Edmund Wilson seeking the Dead Sea scrolls, Stewart Perowne singing in the choir of St. George’s cathedral, Mrs. Vester in her kingdom of the American Colony, Arthur Jeffery, Columbia’s autocratic Professor of Arabic, Kathleen Kenyon and her Jericho crowd, tall and lanky G. Lankester Harding with his endless searches for thamudic or safaitic inscriptions and his picnics at the shore of the Dead Sea, Professor Frank Albright appearing for a rare visitation, Henri Seyrig, the aristocratic and genial director of the French Institute in Beirut, K.A.C. Creswell coming from Cairo, and Père Louis-Hughes Vincent withering away in the Dominican convent of St. Etienne. These people are acutely present in my memory and they are part of my fascination with a city that affected all of them.

In 1960, I was appointed director of the American School for the academic year 1960–61. Relatively prostrate after the partition of 1948, the city was now bustling with a great deal of building and other activities, but it was a frustrated and often depressed city. Old friends were still there, and there were new acquaintances: Paul and Nancy Lapp, our colleagues at the School, with their ferocious passion for archaeological learning; Peter Parr, Diane Kirkbride, and other standard bearers of British archaeology in Palestine and Transjordan; the Egyptian engineers who allowed me to roam all over their scaffolding in the Dome of the Rock they were then restoring; the United Nations teams for whom I organized occasional walking tours of the Haram; the collection of learned men, the one woman, and the assorted diplomats who supervised the operation of the Palestine Archaeological Museum and whose meetings were exemplars of studied politeness; the Supreme Muslim Council that authorized me to photograph the mosaics of the Aqsa Mosque and the perennially laughing Fred Anderegg who took the photographs; the visit of the patriarch of Moscow which taught me much about the silliness of religious politics and of the politics of religion during the Cold War; my friend and colleague Ihor Ševčenko with whom I traveled to Syria and Turkey, who read stories to our children, and who managed to get me into the United States Air Force hospital in Adana when I was too ill to continue the annual trip of the School; Claus Brisch and Christel Kessler, with whom I took several memorable trips to the Jordanian steppe; Richard Ettinghausen gathering information for his book on Arab painting; two American divines appearing at the door of The American School and claiming to be Moses and Elijah; and so many others. Many of the acquaintances and friends from these years are still alive, although retired for the most part, and I hope that they will see this book as, among other things, a tribute to my memories of them.

Between 1961 and 1989, most of my professional and personal life led me away from Jerusalem. Here and there I gave a lecture on the medieval city, I visited it twice and recall in particular a memorable trip in 1972, when Benjamin Mazar and Meir Ben-Dov led me around the excavations they were carrying out to the south and the southwest of the Haram. Those were complicated years for the Old City of Jerusalem, as it became unified with the much larger modern capital of a young and energetic state. It acquired a relatively modern infrastructure which made it cleaner and safer than it had been. The rehabilitation of the Jewish quarter led to important and successful excavations and restorations, the citadel was transformed into a museum, the open space in front of the Western Wall became a site for national Israeli manifestations alongside traditional forms of worship, and the monuments of Mamluk Jerusalem were surveyed and eventually published by the British School in the city. The political and human tensions were often overwhelming, but the Old City survived even the massive building programs around it. I kept on reading and teaching about Jerusalem, maintaining bibliographical files and notes. Once or twice I gave a seminar on it and one in particular, around 1985, rekindled my interest in its character within the broader spectrum of urban history throughout the Islamic world and even elsewhere. Gradually I became more concerned with comparative ways of looking at history and at architectural processes than I had been during my formative years as a scholar, and, during my many years on the Steering Committee of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, I began to see cities as spaces for human behavior and not simply as collections of constructions and of monuments.

When I left Harvard in 1989, after thirty-four years of teaching there and at the University of Michigan, I decided to devote my first years at the Institute for Advanced Study to the many folders of notes and to the various interpretations I had accumulated on Jerusalem in order to write this book. By a stroke of good fortune, this decision led to new and fruitful associations. I had asked Mohammad al-Asad, a Jordanian architect who had completed his doctorate in Harvard’s Department of Fine Arts, to help me with drawings for the book. He suggested investigating the relatively new technology of computer drawing and, together with Abeer Audeh, a young Palestinian architect, he then spent two years preparing a series of computer images of the early medieval city. The problems and limitations involved in using this new technology for reconstructing older cities are described in an appendix of this book. The possibility of manipulating a single image and eventually animating it modified and rationalized my whole conception of the city. The three of us spent many hours simply waiting for images to emerge on the computer screen, and the conversation during these intervals established a bond between us and the city and between us as individuals, one of the brightest memories I have of the whole project. Through Mohammad al-Asad, I was introduced to the Center for Interactive Computer Design at Princeton University and to Kirk Alexander, whose enthusiasm was only occasionally overwhelmed by his responsibilities. The final rendering of the drawings by Mohammad al-Asad and Abeer Audeh was done in the Center for Interactive Computer Design, and a videotape introducing our work was made possible through a grant from the Gladys K. Delmas Foundation. The files on Autocad and this video are available to all who are interested in the subject. I decided to limit most of the architectural illustrations and reconstructions of the city to the outcome of these computer-drawn techniques, inasmuch as new drawings of the traditional variety are worthwhile only if new and accurate measurements are taken.

A second encounter was with Saïd Nuseibeh, a member of a prominent Palestinian family in Jerusalem and professionally a young photographer from San Francisco. Without being aware of my interest in medieval Jerusalem, he had written to volunteer his service for whatever architectural project I had in mind. Thanks to the cooperation of the Supreme Muslim Council in Jerusalem presided over by the Honorable Hasan Talakub and of Dr. Issam Awwad, the efficient chief engineer of the Haram, Saïd Nuseibeh was given permission to photograph, for the first time in color and with all necessary scaffolding and lights, the mosaics of the Dome of the Rock. The results are spectacular, and I have profited much from the enthusiastic insights of Saïd’s artistic temperament. His work was made possible by generous grants from the Palestinian Welfare Association, the Gladys K. Delmas Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study. I hope that the eight assemblages of the mosaics on the inner face of the octagon (figs. 42–49) will give a sense not only of Saïd Nuseibeh’s talent but also of the astounding quality of mosaics which can finally be studied as they deserve to be. A more complete set of photographs is available in a book by Saïd Nuseibeh entitled The Dome of the Rock (forthcoming Rizzoli 1996) to which I wrote an introduction.

I am most grateful for the help of all these individuals and institutions. I hope that they will feel properly rewarded by their having made possible the wider knowledge of monuments hitherto poorly available or restricted to a few travelers with proper connections. And, although I am strongly committed to the principle that all monuments belong equally to all men and women, I acknowledge the special relationship to the Haram al-Sharif which has grown for Muslims from Palestine and neighboring lands. I am glad that young Muslims from Jordan and Palestine were so prominent in the task of presenting Jerusalem. In part, this book reflects my own gratitude for the wonderful ways in which, over four decades, I have been welcomed in Arab and Muslim lands and by colleagues and students, Muslim or Christian, from the Arab world.

For the last stages of this work, I was helped by Joanna Spurza, who took time away from finishing her own thesis to deal with my notes and photographs with energetic efficiency; Suki Lewin and Martha Mulkiewicz who, always with good humor, typed and retyped, printed and collated so many pages with obscure references; the staff of the Library at the Institute for Advanced Study whose genius for finding books and articles is unmatched anywhere except for Solomon’s fabled jinns. Jeff Spurr, the learned slide librarian in the Aga Khan Program at Harvard University was instrumental in finding two photographs with astounding efficiency and rapidity, and this is as good a place as any to thank him and his colleague, Andras Riedlmayer, for many years of intelligent and good-natured help. And I cannot even recall how often conversations with colleagues or visitors in Princeton helped in shaping details or whole interpretations elaborated in this book, but important among them were Glen Bowersock, Muhammad Arkoun, Michael Cook, Mark Cohen, Shaun Marmon, Avrom Udovich, Irving Lavin, Slobodan Čurčič, and Giles Constable. I am also grateful to Lucette Valensi, at the École des Hautes Études in Sciences Sociales in Paris, Anthony Welch at the University of Victoria, Jean-Marie Spieser at the University of Strasbourg, Robert Ilbert at the University of Aix-Provence, Lisa Golombek at the Royal Ontario Museum, Gilbert Dagron and Mark Fumaroli at the Collège de France, all of whom invited me to give lectures and seminars on Jerusalem during which I learned much from very different participants. Special thanks are owed to Renata Holod, who, once again, read one of the drafts of this book, and to my friend Miriam Rosen-Ayalon, who has spent many decades meditating on the monuments of Jerusalem.

I have not profited as much as I could have from the recent Israeli scholarship on early Islamic Jerusalem developed in particular among the philologists and historians at the Hebrew University. Our points of departure and basic concerns are somewhat different, but I might have made better use of Amikan Elad’s Medieval Jerusalem and Islamic Worship (Leiden, 1995), had it come out earlier. I am particularly grateful to Julian Raby for having shown me two unpublished papers of his, which include a lot of information from Jerusalem archives that I thought were unknown except to me, and to Michael McCormick for sharing with me some of his work on Western pilgrims.

In the final analysis, I owe most to the Holy City itself and to Terry Harris Grabar, who shared with me my first enthusiasm for that city and bore most of the practical difficulties of our second stay there with unflinching dedication to her official and family responsibilities. In 1993 when we returned together to the American School, as I still prefer to call it, we took many walks, almost exclusively in the Old City, remembering together how much of what we are now was shaped by these two years in Jerusalem. The city has still a striking mix of holiness among many more sects than before, greed, generosity, hypocrisy, candor, power struggles, images and inscriptions spelling out hate and love, hope and despair, local provincialism and universal presence. It will probably be so till the end of time, as man will always go on shaping the holy to his own level of imperfection.

As usual, a few practical warnings are necessary. Diacritical marks have been avoided except when needed for the transliteration of single words, or for the clarity of an argument. The system of transliteration used is a simplified version of the one used by the Journal of the Middle East Studies Association. Major Koranic quotations in inscriptions are in capital letters, in order to distinguish them from occasional insertions in the midst of them. The large esplanade in the southwestern sector of the Old City in Jerusalem has been more or less indiscriminately called the Haram al-Sharif (its official contemporary appellation), or simply the Haram, Mount Moriah, or the Temple area. The complicated history of each of these terms was and still is beyond my concern. The word “mihrab” is throughout spelled without diacritical marks, as it occurs frequently and with several different meanings.

Finally this book owes a great deal to the gentle and yet firm prodding of Elizabeth Powers and to the patient efforts of Elizabeth Johnson and Carol Cates of Princeton University Press.

Previous chapter

Base text size -

Chapter images ()