According to later documents, after the Siege of Jerusalem in 637 by the Rashidun army under the command of Abu Ubaidah ibn al-Jarrah, Patriarch Sophronius refused to surrender except to the Caliph Omar himself. Omar travelled to Jerusalem and accepted the surrender. He then visited the Church of the Resurrection where Sophronius invited him to pray inside the church, but Omar declined so as not to set a precedent and thereby endanger the church's status as a Christian site. Instead he prayed outside, on the steps east of the church. The first Mosque of Omar was later built at that site, as evidenced by a stone plate with a Kuficinscription found in 1897 in the area of the eastern or outer atrium of the Constantinian Church of the Resurrection, defining this area as a mosque.
The current (southern) Mosque of Omar
The current Mosque of Omar was built in its current shape by the Ayyubid Sultan Al-Afdal ibn Salah ad-Din in 1193 to commemorate the prayer of the caliph Omar. The current mosque is located at a different site than the one where Omar is believed to have prayed and where the earlier mosque was located, since it stands to the south of the church rather than to the east of it. This new position is likely due to the fact that the entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre had by then moved from the east to the south of the church, as a result of repeated destructive events that affected the Holy Sepulchre during the 11th and 12th centuries. The Ayyubid mosque has a high minaret that was built sometime before 1465 during the Mamluk period, maybe after the 1458 earthquake, and was renovated by Ottoman sultanAbdulmecid I.
The two mosques flanking the Holy Sepulchre
The Al-Khanqah al-Salahiyya Mosque, located on the other side of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, has an almost identical minaret, erected in 1418. The two minarets were obviously designed as a pair, and it is interesting to notice that a line connecting the two minarets would intersect the door of the Tomb of Jesus inside the church, while the minarets are equidistant to that door and their tops reach exactly the same elevation, despite starting at different ground levels.
