The City Foretold: Jerusalem, a Prophecy, and the Covenant of Umar (Hidden Histories of the Islamic World) - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

The city had been holy for more than a thousand years. Babylon had burned it, Rome had razed it, and the Persians had sacked it only twenty-three years before. In 637, after months of siege, it was about to change hands once more.

Then the patriarch of Jerusalem stood on the walls and made a demand no one expected. He would open the gates. But he would hand the keys to no general. Only to the caliph himself.

And the caliph came.

Umar ibn al-Khattab, master of a state that now reached from Arabia to Iraq and Syria, set out from Medina with a single servant and a single camel, the two of them taking turns in the saddle. When they reached Jerusalem it was the servant’s turn to ride. The ruler of the new power walked to the gates on foot, in a patched robe, leading the camel by its rope.

What followed has few parallels in the history of conquered cities. Umar’s covenant guaranteed the people of Jerusalem their lives, their property, their churches and their crosses. Invited to pray inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, he refused, and prayed outside, so that no one could ever claim the church in his name. Then he walked to the site of the ancient Temple, buried under centuries of rubble, and began to clear it with his own hands.

But the story did not begin at the gates. Years earlier, in a leather tent at Tabuk, the Prophet had counted six signs that would come before the end of time, and the opening of Jerusalem was one of them. The city had been foretold.

The City Foretold follows that promise from the night journey that bound Jerusalem to Mecca, through the long siege and the meeting at the gate, to a covenant whose memory has outlived empires, down to the keys of the great church, kept to this day by Muslim families.

Built on the earliest Arabic chronicles, read in the original and set beside the Christian testimonies of the seventh century, this is the story of a city opened not by the sword, but by a promise kept.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.