Shrine Renewed

In the early days of Islam, when conquering Arab armies swept across Christian Syria, mosque making consisted of seizing Christian churches, closing their western entrances, opening new doors to the north, and praying facing south across the aisles toward Mecca. A few decades later, Moslem caliphs began to raise the first authentic mosques, blending Byzantine and Persian architecture, and in 691 A.D. the Caliph of Damascus, Abdul Malik Ibn Marwan, completed the great shrine called the Dome of the Rock.

Over the centuries, the lead-sheathed wooden dome and most of the rest of the structure had to be restored on several occasions, but never in history did it suffer so much as from Israeli mortar fire in 1948. Architects reported that the entire structure had been so weakened by bombardment and the ravages of time that it needed renovation at once, and the Moslem nations set about raising $2,000,000 for the job. Last week Jordan's King Hussein, 28, surrounded by Moslem and Christian representatives from Arab nations, reopened the shrine, restored as nearly as possible to the way it was during the Middle Ages.

The original mosque, in what is now Jordanian Jerusalem, was built around the rock from which Mohammed supposedly rode to heaven on horseback in 632 A.D. The architecture was plain: a dome, 72 ft. in diameter, raised on a colonnaded drum to a peak of 116 ft. and set in the center of an octagon. But the decoration was splendid: quartered-marble paneling and glass mosaics on gold backgrounds.

Curved sheets of aluminum bronze alloy have replaced the lead on the dome, thus lightening the load from 200 to a mere 40 tons, and Egyptian and Jordanian architects have added an aluminum staircase inside it. New mosaics, tiles and marble from Italy, Greece, Turkey and Belgium have been set into the walls. The mosque is most resplendent after dark: for the first time, the Dome of the Rock is illuminated like a thousand Arabian nights, with indirect lighting inside and huge spotlights set on the grounds outside.

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