Short Notices

Abstract

The early development of Muslim ideas of the holiness of Jerusalem has attracted considerable interest in recent years. Livni-Kafri has argued that the earliest collections of the fadd'il of the city were already in existence in the third/ninth century and in 1979 Hasson published an edition of the earliest of these texts known to have survived, the early eleventh-century Fadd 'il al-Bayl al-Muqaddas of al-WasitT. Now Livne-Kafri has published the slightly later volume on the same theme by Ibn al-Murajja. The editor argues that this was composed in the 430s (mistakenly given as c. 1130-40 in the introduction: in fact the 430s correspond to A.D. 1038-48). Almost nothing seems to be known of the writer whose life was entirely ignored by the authors of later rijal books. He worked in the traditional forms of Muslim scholarship and was careful to quote his isndds. He begins with a discussion of the holy places of Jerusalem, especially the Dome of the Rock but also including smaller sanctuaries. As the full title suggests he also has short sections on the fadd'il of Syria and Hebron. The work is conventional and unexciting but it does provide further evidence for popular piety and the importance of Jerusalem as a holy city to Muslims in the pre-Crusader period. The edition is made from a single Tubingen MS dated 866/1462 and the editor has provided extensive notes and an index. Livne-Kafri and others, notably Hasson and Elad, have written extensively in this area recently, but the introduction, which is short and to the point, could perhaps have provided an opportunity for a fuller discussion of the background to the work and its place in the literature of Muslim Jerusalem.