The Gate of Mercy as a Contested Monument: Jerusalem’s Sealed Gate as a Muslim Site of Memory

Abstract

Abstract English-language guides to the city of Jerusalem often describe the Golden Gate or Gate of Mercy (Bāb al-Raḥma) as sealed by the Muslims to prevent the return of the Messiah. This narrative, inherited from British colonial-era sources, has no basis in Islamic history or theology. A review of Umayyad, ʿAbbasid, and Fāṭimid-era traditions instead reveals that the Gate of Mercy was a site where Muslims prayed for repentance, envisioned the gardens of paradise, and imagined a Day of Judgment when the Prophets Muḥammad, Moses, and Jesus would stand side-by-side at the throne of God. These descriptions of the gate shifted during the Crusades: encountering a blocked passage, pilgrims attempted to explain the gate’s closure. However, rather than blame any particular religious community for the closure, medieval Muslim, Jewish, and Christian pilgrims described the gate as sealed by heaven on account of its great sanctity. These remained the predominant narratives about the monument until the Ottoman and British empires renewed the Gate of Mercy (and other sites in the Noble Sanctuary/Temple Mount complex) as a battleground for imperial claims-making. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, British travellers wove tales about how Muslims in their ‘childishness’ had sealed the gate to thwart the Messiah, and predicted a Christian conqueror would soon ‘wrest the Holy City from the Moslems’. These Orientalist narratives constructed Jerusalem’s Palestinian community as an impediment to be cleared aside, and silenced shared traditions about the gate. The gate’s history thus reflects how pilgrims, politicians, and other ‘memory activists’ use monuments to manifest preferred pasts and favoured futures. Gates emerge as particularly potent sites where visitors act out personal and political transformations.