Symbolism Essay: The Dome Of The Rock

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My theme of my visual essay is the Dome of the Rock and the controversy that surrounds it. The images for my visual essay are arranged in the order through which I plan to write my final research paper. The Dome of the rock is a 7th century building located in Jerusalem at the visual center of a platform known as the Temple Mount (which is illustrated in the first image). The name of the original sponsor of the building was Umayyad caliph ‘Abd al-Malik in 691 C.E. (Grabar, The Dome of the Rock 62). The second image is intended to aid in the visualization of the Dome of the Rock, not as a mosque, but rather an Islamic shrine that was built over a sacred site. However, exactly which sacred site it is, is still up for debate. Three different religious traditions have significance associated with this site. I am curious to examine how the significance of the Dome of the Rock for each religious tradition effects how it is portrayed in religious art.
For Jews, it is the supposed Jewish site of the near sacrifice of Isaac, which the third image aids in visualizing. The Akedah, or"Binding of Isaac", is the account in the book of Genesis (22: 1-19)of Abraham, at the command of God, taking his son, Isaac, to be offered as a sacrifice in the land of Moriah. Abraham binds his son (hence "the Binding of Isaac") to the altar and is ready to perform the dreadful deed when an angel appears to tell him to stay his hand and to promise him that his seed will increase. This story is the reason that Mount Moriah, or the location of the Dome of the Rock, has retained its Jewish spiritual magnitude through the years. There are two reasons that Jews believe the Dome of the Rock to be the location of the sacrifice of Isaac: a)The sacrifice of ...

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...s a scene from an imagined future Jerusalem where Islam’s Dome of the Rock stands beside a rebuilt Jewish temple and worshipers of different faiths mingle in the courtyard. Is this scene too good to be true? Does each religious claim to the Dome of the Rock, reinforced through visual culture, make such an event unlikely to ever occur? It is ideas such as these that I hope to examine further in my paper.
My research to date significantly influenced how I selected and organized my images. I plan to research more examples of religious works of art that depict each religious standpoint on the Dome of the Rock. I was pleasantly surprised that there were more of these types of images than I was expecting. Because it seems that my use of images will be a main component in my research, I will most likely include some sort of image reference section in my final paper.

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