The Islamization of the Temple Mount is the historical process by which Muslim authorities have sought to appropriate and Islamicize the Temple Mount for exclusive Muslim use. Originally an Israelite and subsequently Jewish holy site, as the location of the First and Second Temples, the site was subsequently the location of a Roman pagan temple, a Byzantine church, a garbage dump, and later the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. It is the holiest site in Judaism and the third holiest site in Sunni Islam.
At the time of the Muslim conquest, the Temple Mount is understood to have been the site of an elaborate Byzantine church with an elaborate mosaic floor, some of the remains of which were discovered in the 1930s by the British Mandate Antiquities Department. In 682 CE, 50 years after Muhammad’s death, ‘Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr rebelled against the Caliph of Damascus, conquered Mecca and stopped pilgrims from coming south to the Hajj in Mecca. ‘Abd al-Malik, the Umayyad Caliph, responded by creating a new holy site. He chose sura 17, verse 1, “Glory to Him who caused His servant to travel by night from the Sacred Mosque to the Farthest Mosque, whose precincts We have blessed, in order to show him some of Our Signs, He is indeed the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing.” And designated the Temple Mount in Jerusalem as the "Farthest Mosque" mentioned in that verse. According to those who hold this view, the Islamization of the Temple Mount climaxed at the end of the seventh century, with the construction of the Dome of the Rock in the early 690s when Abd al-Malik was developing his program of Islamization. It was built over the Foundation Stone, the site of the historic Jewish Temple. The al-Aqsa mosque was built at the southern end of the mount in the 8th-century. Throughout the entire period of the Muslim conquest until the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, various structures were built on the mount including memorial sites and gates. From the 13th-century onwards, after the Muslims had regained control of the city, building projects in Jerusalem and around the Temple Mount sought to further establish the city’s Islamic character. In the early 19th-century, the Ottoman authorities began to permit non-Muslims to visit the Temple Mount, a policy that continued under the British Mandate but ended with the Jordanian conquest.
Post-1967
In 1990, the waqf began construction of a series of outdoor minbar to create open-air prayer areas for use on popular holy days. A monument to the victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre was also erected. In 1996, the Waqf began underground construction of the new el-Marwani Mosque in the southeastern corner of the Temple Mount. The area was claimed by the waqf as a space that served in earlier Islamic periods as a place of prayer, but some saw the move as a part of a "political agenda" and a "pretext" for the Islamization of the underground space, and believed it had been instigated to prevent the site being used a synagogue for Jewish prayers.
