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THE OMARI MOSQUE IN GAZA WAS LARGELY DESTROYED BY ISRAELI BOMBARDMENT
ON DEC. 8, 2023  
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Stephennie Mulder
January 17, 2024
The Conversation
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_ Gaza’s oldest mosque, destroyed in an airstrike, was once a
temple to Philistine and Roman gods, a Byzantine and Catholic church,
and had engravings of Jewish ritual objects _

The Omari Mosque of Gaza., Mohammed Alafrangi, Public domain, via
Wikimedia Commons

 

The Omari Mosque in Gaza was largely destroyed
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by Israeli bombardment
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on Dec. 8, 2023. It was one of the most ancient mosques in the region
and a beloved Gazan landmark
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The mosque was first built in the early seventh century and named
after Islam’s second caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab, a successor to the
Prophet Muhammad and leader of the early Islamic community. It was a
graceful white stone structure
[[link removed]], with
repeating vistas of pointed arches and a tall octagonal minaret
encircled by a carved wooden balcony and crowned with a crescent.

The lower half of the minaret and a few exterior walls are reported to
be the only parts of the mosque still standing
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Gaza is rich in cultural treasures, with some 325 formally registered
heritage sites within just 141 square miles, including three
designated for UNESCO’s World Heritage tentative list
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The Omari Mosque is one of over 200 ancient sites
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damaged or destroyed in Israeli raids since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas
attack.

As a scholar of Islamic architecture and archaeology
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the Omari Mosque as a building that embodies the history of Gaza
itself [[link removed]] – as
a site of frequent destruction, but also of resilience and renewal
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While narratives about Gaza often center on war and conflict, Gaza’s
rich history and pluralistic identity as expressed through its
cultural heritage equally deserve to be known.

Layered histories

The sun-soaked coastal enclave of Gaza
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with the tidy stone buildings of its old city and its verdant olive
and orange groves, has been a trade hub that connected the
Mediterranean with Africa, Asia and Europe for millennia. It was famed
in particular as a transit point for incense, one of the ancient
world’s most precious commodities. Given its abundant agricultural
and maritime riches
[[link removed]], Gaza has
known conquest by nearly every powerful empire, including the ancient
Egyptians, the Romans, the early Islamic caliphs, the Crusaders and
the Mongols.

Gaza’s history of repeated conquest meant that buildings were often
destroyed, reimagined and rededicated to accommodate changing
political and religious practices. New sacred structures were
continually built over old ones, and they frequently incorporated
“spolia,” or stones reused from prior buildings. The Omari Mosque,
too, was such an architectural palimpsest: a building embodying the
layered, living material history of the city.

In the second millennium B.C., the site of the mosque is believed to
have been a temple for Dagon, the Philistine god of the land and good
fortune. The temple is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible
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as the one whose walls were felled by the warrior Samson, who is
locally believed to be buried in its foundations
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In 323 B.C., Gaza fiercely resisted
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of Alexander the Great, and the city endured devastating destruction
when it was finally subdued. Yet after Gaza was conquered by the
Romans in 50 B.C. it entered a period of renewed wealth and
prosperity. A concentric domed temple was built for Marnas, a god of
storms and the protector of the city, on the site of the future
mosque. He was venerated there until just before 400 A.D., when the
Byzantine Empress Eudoxia imposed the new faith of Christianity
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destruction of the temple.

The priests of the temple barricaded themselves inside
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and hid the statues and ritual objects in an underground room. But the
temple was destroyed and a Greek Orthodox church rose in its place.
The stones, however, preserved the tale: in 1879 a monumental,
10-foot-high statue of Marnas, portrayed in the guise of Zeus, was
excavated and its discovery made international media headlines
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The statue is now in the Istanbul Archaeological Museums.

The Byzantine church, too, was destined to be transformed. In the
early seventh century, the Muslim general Amr ibn al-As conquered
Gaza, and the church was converted into the Omari Mosque. Yet the
continued presence of Gazan churches
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and synagogues
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attested to pluralistic norms that characterized the region under
various Islamic dynasties until the modern era
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Gaza under Islamic rule

Gaza thrived under Islamic rule: Medieval travelers described it as a
remarkably fertile, creative and beautiful city, with prominent
Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities
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flourishing urban center when the European Crusaders arrived. When the
city fell to the Crusader King of Jerusalem, Baldwin III, in 1100, the
Omari Mosque was converted once again – this time into a Catholic
cathedral
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dedicated to St. John the Baptist.

The Muslim general Saladin defeated the Crusaders in 1187, and Gaza
returned to Islamic rule. The church was transformed back into a
mosque, and in the 13th century its elegant octagonal minaret was
raised. Yet the reconversion into a mosque preserved much of the
Crusader church, and the majority of the nave
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were still visible in modern times.

It was in this period that the mosque became famed for its
extraordinary library containing thousands of books, the earliest
dating to the 13th century. After the library of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in
Jerusalem, the Omari Mosque’s collection was one of the richest in
Palestine
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In the 13th century, the mosque endured destruction by the Mongols as
well as major earthquakes that would repeatedly topple the minaret.
Its rebuilding after each of these disasters speaks to the ongoing
centrality of the mosque in the communal life of the people of Gaza.

The stones tell the tale

Later, Gaza continued to flourish as a coastal port city, where
Muslims, Christians, Jews and others lived in the vast, cosmopolitan
Ottoman Empire.

In the late 19th century, as scholars explored Gaza’s heritage, an
eloquent reminder of the building’s layered history emerged: a
relief on a mosque pillar depicting a seven-branched menorah
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and Jewish ritual objects, including a shofar, or horn, surrounded by
a wreath. The name Hanania, son of Jacob, was engraved in Hebrew and
Greek.

Its date is uncertain, but it seems likely to have been a column from
a synagogue reused during the building of the Byzantine church, which
was used again in the building of the mosque: yet another layer in the
architectural palimpsest that was the Omari Mosque.

A few decades later, during World War I, the mosque was severely
damaged
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when a nearby Ottoman arms depot was targeted by British artillery
fire. In the 1920s, the stones were once again gathered and the mosque
was rebuilt.

[Ruins of an ancient monument that show a few intact walls, with
stones and other debris scattered around.]
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Early 20th century photographs of the Omari Mosque of Gaza after the
British bombing include this image of the central part of the Crusader
church preserved in the mosque. Archnet
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After the 1948 creation of the state of Israel, Gaza became the
sanctuary of tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees. The area was
primarily administered by Egypt until it was captured by Israel in
1967.

It was at some point after the 1967 war, when Jewish symbols had come
to be associated with the state of Israel and its occupation of Gaza,
that the menorah relief was effaced from the column
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in the mosque.

A future for the Omari Mosque

On Dec. 8, 2023, Israel became the most recent military force to
target the mosque. The library, too, may have been ruined, a treasure
house of knowledge that will not so easily be rebuilt. A digitization
project [[link removed]] completed
in 2022 preserves an imprint of the library’s riches. Still, digital
files can’t replace the material significance of the original
manuscripts.

The hundreds of other heritage sites damaged or destroyed include
Gaza’s ancient harbor and the fifth century Greek Orthodox Church of
Saint Porphyrius
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one of the oldest churches in the world.

From today’s vantage point, it seems extraordinary that the menorah
relief had endured for over 1,000 years: a Jewish symbol unremarkably
cohabiting inside a Muslim prayer hall. In truth, both the relief and
its removal embody the story of Gaza itself, a fitting reminder of the
many centuries of destruction, coexistence and resilience embodied in
the mosque’s very stones.

And if the Omari Mosque’s richly layered history is any indication,
the people of Gaza will raise those stones again.[The Conversation]

Stephennie Mulder
[[link removed]],
Associate Professor of Art History, _The University of Texas at Austin
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This article is republished from The Conversation
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the original article
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* War on Gaza
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* Israel
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* Byzantine
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* Sacred sites
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* religion
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* Roman
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* Hamas
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* mosque
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