The Distant Shrine

Book excerpt: Jerusalem, the holiest of holy cities, revered and contested by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. The claims of the first two are amply and handsomely documented in a great spate of books, many of them eulogies or devotional tracts rather than histories. But it is Muslim Jerusalem that few of us comprehend, though the idea of it has run like a bloodily glowing thread through most of what has happened in the Middle East since 1948. Here F.E. Peters, an eminent historian of both Jerusalem and Islam, looks at that neglected side of this most publicized and controversial of cities. The Distant Shrine is neither a brief for a Muslim Jerusalem nor a polemic against Islam, but a serious and objective unfolding of what Jerusalem has meant to Muslims from their first settlement there down to the beginning of modern times. It is also history writing at its best: convincing in its grasp, comprehensive in its presentation, elegant in its expression. The Distant Shrine is that rarest of all histories: a work for the scholar and the layman alike.