Arabs Capture Jerusalem

In 638 AD, Jerusalem passed from Byzantine to Arab Muslim rule after a siege by the armies of the Rashidun Caliphate. The city surrendered by negotiation rather than assault, and its transfer marked a turning point in the long religious history of a place already sacred to Jews and Christians. Under Muslim rule it would become the third holiest city in Islam, giving Jerusalem its enduring status as a center of three faiths.

The background lay in decades of exhaustion. The Byzantine and Sasanian Persian empires had fought a devastating war in the early seventh century, during which Persian forces took Jerusalem in 614 and carried off what Christians venerated as the True Cross. The Byzantine emperor Heraclius recovered the city around 629, but his empire was drained. Meanwhile, after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, the new caliphate rapidly expanded out of Arabia, and its armies began winning victories in Syria and Palestine, including the decisive battle at the Yarmuk River in 636.

With Byzantine field armies defeated, Jerusalem was besieged. According to later Muslim and Christian sources, the Patriarch Sophronius agreed to surrender on the condition that the caliph himself come to receive it. Umar ibn al-Khattab is traditionally said to have traveled to the city and granted its Christian inhabitants a covenant guaranteeing their lives, property, and places of worship in exchange for tribute. The exact date of the surrender, the details of the journey, and the wording of the pact are debated, since the surviving accounts were written well after the events and the surviving text of the covenant may reflect later developments.

The consequences were significant. Christian churches remained in use, and Jews, who had been barred from the city under Byzantine rule, were allowed to return, though how many did so and when is uncertain. Muslims began to venerate the Temple Mount, the site associated with Muhammad's Night Journey. Later in the seventh century, the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik built the Dome of the Rock there, and the nearby al-Aqsa Mosque followed, giving the city a lasting Islamic architectural identity.

The capture was part of a broader transformation of the Middle East, as Syria, Palestine, and Egypt moved permanently out of Byzantine control. Jerusalem would change hands many times in later centuries, through the Crusades and beyond, and the traditions surrounding Umar's entry continue to be cited in modern discussions of coexistence and competing claims to the city.