The Dome of the Rock’s construction forced Christians to view Muslim rule as permanent

Evidence

The crisis in Christian minds would have been accentuated by the construction of the Dome of the Rock mosque, a refutation of the Christian vision of history anchored firmly in the bedrock of Jerusalem, spiritual center of the Christian world. Surely the chroniclers who had portrayed the Muslim invaders as an ephemeral divine chastisement were wrong. Confronted by this symbol of Muslim political and spiritual might, in the midst of the rising tide of conversion and Arabization, a new, darker vision of God’s plan was forged: the anonymous Syriac author of the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius (c. 692) presented the Muslim domination as part of the drama of the last days. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 315

Categorization

• XREF: Architecture as political-theological statement connects to the Dome of the Rock’s inscription program and to the broader argument in Tolan’s book; also resonates with my reading on built environment as ideological claims to territory.