Page:Folk-lore of the Holy Land.djvu/16

xiv Scriptural and the fabulous; and I have heard Christians as well as Moslems extol the character of Omar and depict it not amiss. They relate that when the homely old man arrived, unattended, upon the camel which had borne him all the way from El Medìneh, to receive in person the submission of a place so holy as Jerusalem, the splendid slaves of the late Byzantine government, cringing, led him to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; fully expecting him to say his prayers there, and turn the church into a mosque. But he declined to pass the threshold, praying from without upon the name of Jesus. He was led thence to other churches, but would enter none of them, preferring for the scene of his devotions the summit of Mount Moriah, site of Herod’s Temple and of Solomon’s, which was at that time a waste of ruins. This was the Beyt el Makdas, the House of the Sanctuary, to which angels came in pilgrimage long before the creation of Adam—that “further temple” to which Muhammad was carried in his sleep from Mekka, and whence he started on his marvellous “night-journey” through the Seven Heavens. Here the conqueror caused to be built a noble shrine, the Dome of the Rock, which we to this day call the Mosque of Omar.

Omar’s severity towards the Christians was so much below their anticipations that he figures in the popular memory almost as a benefactor of their