As we continued our week together, the Christians in the group were invited to enter the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock on the Harem es Sharrif--a rare privilege considering today's political situation.
The Al Aqsa Mosque is a place of prayer, and five times a day the call to prayer begins with the singing of a phrase in Arabic that means "God is grater than". Our Muslim lecturer told us that in English the thought is incomplete, but in Arabic it means that God is greater than whatever you are doing, and that it is time to pray. On Fridays at noon there are about 10,000 who come to the Al Aqsa to pray. During Ramadan there are upwards of 200,000 who attend Friday noon day prayers there, over flowing onto the entire Harem.
Next we visited the Dome of the Rock, a shrine commemorating Muslim remembrance of a night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem by the prophet Mohammed. For Muslims its the place where Abraham almost sacrificed his son Ismael. The interior is now under restoration, but the depth of its decoration makes the Al Aqsa look plain by comparison. The rock under the dome is held by Jews to be the Foundation Stone, from which all creation began, and the place where Abraham almost sacrificed his son Issac. It might also be the place where the Holy of Holys of the Jewish temples stood. For Christians it marks the location of the temple where Jesus over turned the tables of the buyers and sellers, and had his final (or initial) conflict with the Jewish temple elders.
This last photo is of part of a quote from the Koran's version of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary that she would have a son.
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