J.L. Barnett
The Jerusalem Report
May 2, 2005
The final door is opened, an enormously heavy door swinging on massive hinges and secured by massive bolts. I walk down three stone steps into a bone-chillingly cold chamber that was carved out of the bedrock 1,500 years ago. The cave, some nine feet square, is dimly lit by 42 permanently burning, hanging olive oil lanterns, and as my eyes adjust to the dim light and haze of frankincense, a large, long glass case comes into view.
In it is the mummified figure of an immensely tall man, with black dried hair still on his sallow cheeks and head, arms folded across his breast, long wiry fingers and browned fingernails. He appears to be smiling strangely, teeth just showing as if in oblique acknowledgment of his visitor. Christian tradition calls this "The Uncorrupted Body of Father Sophronius" – his perfect state of preservation seen as a testament to his miraculous and holy life.
I am in Theodosius Monastery, deep in the Judean Desert. Sophronius was the first Christian patriarch of Jerusalem, who, on July 15, 638, surrendered the Holy City to the Muslims. The wily old patriarch brokered a shrewd and lasting agreement with the all-powerful Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second of the "Four Rightly Guided Caliphs of Islam" and a close friend of the Prophet Muhammad, who had died only six years earlier.
Islam, dramatically slicing its way across the known world, was on the rise, and Christianity seemingly on the wane. It was left to Sophronius, negotiating from a position of great weakness, to secure the best possible deal for his city's Christians, enabling them to survive the initial years of Muslim rule. With the exception of 151 years of Crusader Christian rule, Jerusalem remained in spirit a Muslim city for an unbroken 1,290 years, until 1948. (The British, during the Mandate, made no change to the status quo.) This startling fact is crucial to understanding the way the city operates and the subtle forces at work within it.
Although not mentioned by name in the Koran, Jerusalem is considered by Muslims the third holiest place on earth, after Mecca and Medina. This is because upon the Prophet's death, in Medina, his spirit rose to heaven upon El-Baraq, his winged steed, from what Muslims now call the Haram al-Sharif - the Noble Sanctuary, what Jews call the Temple Mount.
In the Muslim vision of the End of Days, the Ka'aba itself, in a miraculous flight from Mecca, will enter the Dome of the Rock, whose central area was designed exactly to fit the structure. The cataclysmic collision of the black rock in the southeastern corner of the Ka'aba with the world's foundation stone will bring about the immediate End of Days. For these reasons, it is for Jerusalem, not Mecca, that Muslims reserve that most honored of titles – simply Al-Quds (The Holy).
Initially, Umar's rule over the city was benign. Thanks to the deal secured by Patriarch Sophronius, the Holy Sepulcher church was left undisturbed and Christians were guaranteed rights of passage. Jews, who were seen as a people of true monotheistic loyalties, were permitted to re-enter the city, where they were treated with relative magnanimity.
That united Islam of 638 CE Jerusalem is now very different. Over a period of some 22 years I have located and observed a total of 116 Islamic sects within the city. Most of Jerusalem's Muslims, like most of the world's, are Sunni, but within the community are many subdivisions. Among the city's more esoteric Islamic groups are the Sufi orders, all of which have as the focal point of their activities a particular spot within the hallowed grounds of the Haram al-Sharif.
Sufism can be traced back to Islam's early centuries, after the faith had become the region's dominant religion. As both a mystical and an intellectual movement, it offered Islam a way of incorporating the learning of the Greek philosophers, and of offering a home to members of the numerous mystical groups that now found themselves within the Muslim realm.
The Sufi leader Abu-Hamid al-Ghazali (1058-1111) created a legal system for Sunni Muslims and established schools that specialized not only in theology but also medicine, astronomy and other sciences. Once this became the dominant theological trend in Islam, the Sufis in a sense retreated into the mystical and meditative identity by which we think of them today.
Sufism maintains the doctrine that there is a duality of souls within each person - a human self and a separate divine self. The human part of our souls is given dominance at birth, but it is said to be the duty of every Muslim to wage a personal jihad - struggle - to reverse that dominance. The aim should be the victory of the divine soul within us at the expense of the human soul, which gradually perishes. The practical implications of this led to the Sufi belief that every human has to follow an ordered, disciplined and, above all, ethical life. Their goal is fana - a union with God so ecstatic, so passionate, that the barriers between creator and created are dissolved.
Jerusalem has representatives of four of the world's seven principal Sufic orders. The Qadiriyah, founded in Baghdad in the mid-12th century by Abd al-Qadir, are the forerunners of the famed Whirling Dervishes, who use meditative trance-like dances as a mystical technique to gain closeness to the Divine. There are some 80 members of this scholarly group in Jerusalem, and they spend their weekdays studying Koran - and Saturdays whirling - in the basement of the Muslim Quarter's Al-Umariyya School.
The Naqshbandiyah are a politically active order, based in Pakistan and renowned for their prolific poets and philosophers. They are also fearsome warriors, and there is a Naqshbandiyah unit in the rebel Chechnyan army. Their leader in Jerusalem is the gentle and handsome Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bukhari, who lives above a photo shop on the Via Dolorosa.
The Daraqwiyah are a powerful force within the Maghreb region, in particular in Morocco, where the birthday of their 19th-century founder, Mulay Arabi Daraqwi, is observed as a national holiday. This order was the driving force behind the Jihad Movement in the period of mass conversions of the Berber peoples in the late 19th century. They largely dispersed from Jerusalem after the destruction of the Moghrabi Quarter, following the Six-Day War.
The fourth of the orders, the Khalwatiyah, hailed from Azerbaijan and Persia 700 years ago, and became closely associated with the Ottoman sultans, providing them with an entree to the Jerusalem stage. Members of this sect, the most secretive of the orders, follow an extremely strict regimen of fasting, meditation and self-imposed exclusion from mainstream Islamic society.
To the northwest of the Dome of the Rock is a tiny free-standing cupola, easily missed amid the compound's other magnificent structures. The cupola, called Qubbat El-Khadr - the Dome of the Green - takes the form of a hexagonal drum resting upon six dainty marble columns. The capitals on the top of each column are from a long-gone Byzantine building, likely a church.
Remarkable events occur around this spot. On the eve of the Muslim holy days, members of the Qadiriyah sect gather here. A lantern holding a candle is placed in the center of the floor's structure. Then they start a silent dignified whirling dance, something that may last for minutes but can also go on for hours. As long as the spirit possesses them, they will whirl in the silence. On winter nights, as winds and sometimes rains lash the dancers, they continue to slowly whirl around the candle.
The Khalwatiyah speak as they whirl, in their long green robes with wide tapering sleeves and tall, red Bukharan turbans, but only one word - Allah, or God. Over and over, at different speeds and volumes, they utter this most simple of God's 99 names, as found in the Koran.
There are also Sufis who come to Elijah's Dome on an individual basis. High up on the Mount of Olives lives a community of around 70 Sufis, a mixed collection of individuals who seek a closeness with Allah through the Sufi path. They have all manner of regular daily lives and jobs and can be seen climbing the steep paths up to their lodgings at any time of the day or night.
One of their number is a man by the name of Faisel Abd el-Malek, who is named after the great Caliph Abd el-Malik, the Umayyad ruler who constructed the Dome of the Rock in 691. He is a pious man who has dedicated his life to an extremely strict regimen of meditation and prayer in and around the Sufi cupola.
Faisel was once the custodian of the austere Kanker mosque - the last Jerusalem mosque that still hosts Sufi groups on a regular basis. The Kanker was constructed in 1189 by Saladin, who built it on one of the city's high points. On top of the mosque, which is situated near the northwest corner of the Christian Quarter overlooking the rear of the Holy Sepulcher church, he had an added floor built to house a garrison of his soldiers so they could use the holy location to keep a very close eye on those that he ruled over. The locals, who felt threatened by this invasive military presence, nicknamed the mosque the "Kanker" - from the Arabic (and also Hebrew) word hanek, strangulation.
But Faisel recently offered me another explanation for the mosque's name, a story that brings us back to the patriarch Sophronius.
Although they are a small minority, there are Sufis who cling to what they say are ancient pre-Islamic traditions. They call themselves neither Jew, Christian or Muslim - "We are simply Sufi," they say to me. I have come across these on three occasions in my travels - in Sudan, in eastern Iran and in what has been identified by archaeologists as a small Middle Bronze Age (2250-1570 BCE) Canaanite cave on the southern slope of the Hinnom Valley in Jerusalem, which is still visited today by Sufis who come there to meditate and to study.
In the year 636, a leader of these pre-Islamic Sufi cave dwellers was strangled one afternoon by a crowd of angry Christians. He managed to survive for one hour but finally expired at 4 p.m. that day. Patriarch Sophronius, horrified by this ghastly slaying by his own people of a respected Sufi mystic, took his remains and had them interred in a grave in what is now on El-Wad street, close to the Western Wall tunnels. To this day, every afternoon from 3 to 4 p.m., the room of his sepulcher is opened and lights are lit in memorial to the man, and at the precise time that he died, Sufis gather there and incant verses from the Koran and the hadith as the market bustle of the street outside continues.
When Saladin came to the city, he named one of his new mosques after that great departed murdered Sufi, calling it the "Mosque of Strangulation."
But this story, passed on by my friend Faisel, struck me as particularly beautiful because it completed a circle of thousands of years of history. Started by a Bronze Age Sufi, it is carried through by Christian Sophronius, then by Muslims Umar and Saladin, and now reappears again, as Sufi orders flourish in multi-religious, current-day Jewish-ruled Jerusalem. Little wonder that the Uncorrupted Body of old Sophronius keeps on smiling.