The Dome of the Rock is an octagonal building crowned by a dome, standing in the courtyard of the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem 1 2. Wikidata dates its construction to 691 CE 2. Muhammad Qabbani writes that Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan ordered, in 72 AH, a mosque to be built over the Rock from which, he says, the Prophet ﷺ was taken up on the night of the Isra and Mi'raj, and he counts it among the best-known mosques the Umayyads raised 3 4. The Thesaurus d'Epigraphie Islamique records for it a building inscription dated 72 AH 5.
Al-Maqdisi described it in Ahsan al-Taqasim, a book he completed in 375 AH, as an octagonal building with four gilded doors, each facing a flight of steps 6 1. Inside are three ambulatories circling on columns that he calls finer than marble, and above them a dome sheathed in gilded brass that rises a hundred cubits into the air 7. He says that when the sun rises on it the dome shines and its drum glitters, and that he had seen nothing like it in Islam 7. Later Ibn Fadl Allah al-Umari, in Masalik al-absar, described the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Rock as the building stood in the year 743 AH, drawing on a short book by Taj al-Din Ahmad ibn Amin al-Mulk that set down the measurements in cubits 8 9. There the octagonal building rises eighteen cubits above the paved court, and its northern door is called the Gate of Paradise 9 10.
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