Religious Geography and Political Conflict

Jerusalem's Old City compresses sites sacred to all three Abrahamic faiths into an area of roughly one square kilometer. The Temple Mount, site of the First and Second Jewish Temples, is today home to the Dome of the Rock, completed in 691-692 CE under the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque; Muslims know the compound as Haram al-Sharif and associate it with Muhammad's Night Journey and Ascension (Isra and Mi'raj). The compound's western retaining wall, the Western Wall, remains Judaism's holiest accessible site, and this extraordinary geographic concentration of overlapping sacred claims has made the site a recurring flashpoint for confrontation between the three traditions.