the Ṣakhrah, amid the ruins of the Temple courts, of which traces only were left. The triumphs of the khalifs of Damascus were preceded by fierce internal dissensions in Islâm. When ’Othmân, the third khalîfah, died, in 644 A. D., Muawîyah, the son of Abu Ṣofiân--Muḥammad’s old enemy, head of the elder branch of that Ḳoreish family to which the prophet belonged--was ruler of Syria. He refused to recognise ’Aly, the son-in-law of Muḥammad, as the fourth khalîfah, and war between the two parties ensued. In 660 ’Aly was assassinated at Ḳufa by the poisoned sword of an anarchist, and his son Ḥasan abdicated six months later in favour of Muawîyah. The Persian legend of Ḥasan and Ḥosein has no true foundation. Ḥasan was poisoned by his wife in 667 A. D., at the instigation, it is said, of Yezîd, son of Muawîyah. The latter was still khalîfah at Damascus till 680 A. D. Ḥosein, whom the Persian story represents as being a boy, was about fifty-four when he fell at the battle of Kerbela in the same year. Ḥasan is said to have left fifteen sons and five daughters, and among these were the children of Fâṭimah, the prophet’s daughter, from whom the later Khalifs of Egypt claimed descent. The struggle between the two parties of the Ḳeis and the Yemini--or Syrians, and Arabs of the Yemen--went on yet later, and the memory of these factions is indeed not yet dead[456] even to-day in Palestine. ’Abd el Melek was the fifth khalîfah of Damascus (685–705 A. D.) of the family of Muawîyah, and for eight years before his accession Islâm was rent by internecine quarrels. ’Abd-Allah ibn Zobeir led the Yemen faction, and Arabia and Africa refused to acknowledge the Omawîyah family as khalifs. It was at this time that ’Abd el Melek conceived the idea of making Jerusalem the Ḳiblah for the faithful, and--as he had no access to the Black Stone at Mekkah--of inducing them to perambulate the Ṣakhrah rock instead. It was then probably that Muḥammad was first said to have been miraculously borne by the lightning cherub to Jerusalem, and to have ascended from the holy rock to heaven. The legend grew out of a single verse in the Ḳorân: “Glory to Him who carried His servant by night from the Ḥaram place of prayer to the place of prayer that is more remote.”[457] This probably referred to the Medînah mosque, but was now understood to mean the one at Jerusalem--the great enclosure where Justinian’s church still stood, as a Moslem place of prayer; and it thus received the name _Masjid el Aḳṣa_, or “the more distant mosque.” These events preceded, and account for, the building of a Moslem shrine over the site of the Temple itself, which had been unoccupied for six hundred years. [Sidenote: ’ABD EL MELEK]