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JERUSALEM AND MECCA ARE TWO OF THE MOST FAMOUS holy cities in the world. An enormous amount of literature and scholarly treatises has been written about each one of them. Nevertheless very little if anything has been done in way of comparative study. Most comparisons deal with the relationship of the sanctity of Jerusalem in Islam to that of Mecca in Islam or with the sanctity of Jerusalem in all three religions. What I shall try to do in this paper is to compare the sanctity of each city in its "natural," original surroundings with the other, and learn from this comparison something more general about each one of the two religions,Judaism and Islam.
Let me start with the similarities between the two holy cities. They are numerous, but I shall mention just three basic ones:
A. According to scholars of both traditions the sanctity of both cities is very ancient and seems to stem from pre-monotheistic times and from a specific part of the city: In Mecca it is the Ka`ba shrine and the small Black Stone in its eastern wall which were ancient sites of pre-Islamic pagan worship; in Jerusalem it is "Aravna's threshing floor" (2 Samuel 23:18ff.) which King David bought and where he erected an altar and burnt offerings to God. This was the place where the temple was erected later by King Solomon, and because of the huge rock in it, it may well have been an early pre-monotheistic place of worship.
B. Both the Temple mount and the Ka`ba infected, as it were, their respective cities with their sanctity. Although these are two very different shrines-at the Ka`ba no offerings are burnt and there is no priesthood in Islam (the sacrifice which ends the pilgrimage is a family feast)-the same process of sanctifying the city took place in both. The cities became holy because God dwelled in each one of them. Of course, the idea that God dwells in any specific place was long ago rejected by both religions. Nevertheless this ancient premonotheistic notion held on as a metaphor and the cities became holy because they surrounded the site that God-as the ancient kings did-chose to dwell in, His house or palace as it were. Slowly, but surely the...