ABSTRACT
Jerusalem, a city that was completely Christian in the Byzantine period, came under Muslim rule around AD 638 and in the course of the following Umayyad period up to AD 750 the city acquired an increasingly Muslim character. With the construction of the Dome of the Rock, the al-Aqṣa Mosque and other buildings in the renovated Masjid al-Aqṣa compound, along with a complex of palatial buildings to the south, the Umayyads undertook in Jerusalem the largest longterm building project anywhere in the caliphate, which endowed the city with a new added layer of exceptional religious significance. Yet Jerusalem remained a predominantly Christian city, with fuller Islamization taking centuries longer. In the Umayyad period the Muslims concentrated their building efforts in the eastern part of the city on and around the former temple mount, which the Christians had deliberately left derelict, and left the Christian majority undisturbed in the western part of the city. Only in later centuries, as their presence grew, did the Muslims begin to establish a presence in that part of Jerusalem.
