Islamic Jerusalems? Conflicting memories of the holy city in the eighth/fourteenth century

It is widely said that Jerusalem is regarded by Muslims as the third holiest city, after Mecca and Medina. Yet alongside all of the evidence for Muslims venerating Jerusalem as a sacred space and holy city, there are always indications of the possible controversies that such veneration could raise. These controversies could be said to have come to a head during the lifetime of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328), when he issued a relatively lengthy judicial opinion (fatwā) arguing very strongly against a whole host of pilgrimage practices involving Jerusalem and attempting to undermine as far as possible claims for the sanctity of that city and of many widely venerated sites within it, particularly the rock. In this fatwā, Ibn Taymiyya even questioned the significance of the famous Dome of the Rock as well as Jerusalem’s status as a ḥaram. With Ibn Taymiyya’s fatwā, there is very clear evidence of both the existence of a controversy around Jerusalem’s veneration, on the one hand, but also of how that controversy revolved around conflicting memories of Jerusalem’s sites’ relevance in Islamic salvation history. To understand those conflicting memories, this article will consider a number of political and social developments in the Mamluk empire, developments that involved its Christian and Jewish as well as its Muslim inhabitants.