The World's Most Contested Church
The World's Most Contested Church
Christ's tomb and the Nero of Egypt
From the moment the nails pierced Christ’s hands, one site has been revered by Christians more than any other — the place of his death and burial, Jerusalem.
While Jerusalem itself is a flashpoint of inter-religious conflict, Jesus’s tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is even more so. Not only do the half-dozen Christian groups who administer it frequently break into open conflict during services, but the very ground on which the church is built has been torn between religions since the third century.
But no event has defined the Church of the Holy Sepulchre’s history as much as its destruction at the hands of a 10th-century Islamic ruler. His life and actions, which took place over a millennium ago, continue to shape our world today…
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The Mad Caliph
Caliph al-Hakim is variously described as an ideal and just ruler on the one hand, and an eccentric, unbalanced tyrant on the other. Few sources still claim him as an orthodox Muslim; in fact, his teachings strayed so far from mainstream Islam that they spawned their own religion, Druze, whose adherents claim him as a divine being.
Al-Hakim’s seemingly arbitrary diktats — from outlawing specific vegetables to killing all the dogs in the city to silence their barking — earned him the nickname “The Mad Caliph.” His persecution and cruelty towards Christians and Jews, as well as orders of destructive violence, also had him named “The Nero of Egypt.”
But the Mad Caliph stamped his mark on history with special force in 1009, when he infamously ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
At this point the Church was already nearly 700 years old, having been built by Constantine after the discovery of what he believed to be the tomb of Christ. Originally, Constantine had destroyed the site’s original temple to Venus in order to proclaim the superiority of Christ and the Christian religion. Now, however, al-Hakim would destroy the Christian church to send a message of Islamic superiority.
Why al-Hakim chose to destroy it is a historical mystery — while occasionally hostile towards other religions, he generally adhered to a policy of tolerance. But in the case of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the caliph made an exception. Some sources ascribe this to his stern sense of the dignity of Islam, while others suspect that the Caliph, the son of a Christian woman, sought to distance himself from associations with Christianity. Many simply put it down to the actions of a man of uncertain mental stability.
No matter the reason, in 1009 al-Hakim’s men gathered to reduce the church to rubble. Once the building itself was demolished, the attackers then used fire to destroy the underlying marble, as well as the relics and other articles found in the church.
After the destruction of the church, this wave of destruction flowed outward, with al-Hakim continuing to target Christian and Jewish sites throughout Jerusalem. Torahs and synagogues burned along with Bibles and churches.
While al-Hakim’s campaign of violence was overall short-lived, it had long-term consequences — the eccentric ruler may have inadvertently changed history more than he intended to by indirectly prompting the Crusades.
A Cycle of Violence
Al-Hakim’s death was as puzzling as his life: in 1021, he disappeared while taking a walk at night, never to be heard from again.
By 1038, subsequent rulers permitted the local Christian population to start rebuilding the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. However, the memory of the Holy Sepulchre’s destruction lived on in the Western Christian world — it became the archetypal act of aggression by Islam toward beleaguered Christians.
Less than a hundred years after al-Hakim destroyed the church, Byzantium found itself under brutal siege by Arab Muslim forces. At the same time, Seljuk Turks encroached on the Islamic empire, taking control of the Holy Land and persecuting its Christian populations.
With the memory of the ignoble destruction of an irreplaceable holy site still burning in Christian cultural memory, Pope Urban II responded to these combined crises with 90,000 European troops — and the First Crusade began.