Posted Monday, July 31, 2006; 20:00 HKT

Wajeeh Nuseibeh is sitting on a bench in the shadow of a giant wooden door studded with iron. The door is so big that it seems to shrink Wajeeh to the size of a church mouse. A portly man of 55 years, Wajeeh has one of the world's more unusual jobs: his business card reads: "Custodian and Door-Keeper of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher." The Sepulcher, in Jerusalem, is Christianity's holiest shrine. Believers say it houses Golgotha, the site where Jesus Christ was crucified, the Stone of Unction on which Christ lay, and the tomb from which he rose again. Yet, for centuries, the guardianship of the Sepulcher has lain with a Muslim family whose latest representative is Wajeeh. "Nobody in the whole world," he says, "is allowed to open the church but me."

Jerusalem is at the center of three faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Each religion has fought for exclusive possession of the city, turning holy ground into a battlefield. The Sepulcher is sacred to Christians alone, but it's not immune to Jerusalem's fever of discord. Nobody knows this better than the Nuseibehs, who have witnessed this mixture of faith and acrimony for hundreds of years.

The practice of a Muslim guarding the Sepulcher began in A.D. 638, when the Islamic ruler Caliph Omar captured Jerusalem and placed one of his Arab warriors, an ancestor of the Nuseibehs, in charge. Since then, the Nuseibehs have not only guarded the church but acted as referees among seven warring Christian groups; the three most powerful—Roman Catholics, Greeks, and Armenians—own 70% of the property. Each group professes to be the rightful heir of the shrine. They loathe one another in a most un-Christian fashion, contesting every angel's hair-breadth of holy space inside the cavernous basilica. A few years ago, some 500 Greek and Franciscan monks brawled for hours, tossing benches and clubbing each other with giant candlestick holders, all because one sect might have trespassed on another's sacred property. Centuries of suspicion and envy have made it so only a Muslim can be trusted with the Sepulcher's keys. Says Wajeeh: "The Christians see me as neutral."

But when Marco Polo stopped in Jerusalem to obtain a vial of holy oil from the Sepulcher to present Kublai Khan, the Nuseibehs were anything but neutral. Jerusalem's Muslim rulers feared spies among the pilgrims to the Sepulcher, secretly mapping attack routes for the crusaders; visitors, therefore, were blindfolded and led to the shrine, and no Christian could spend the night in the city. According to Dan Bahat, an Israeli biblical archeologist, Polo and his armed followers probably camped on a hill beyond Jerusalem's Damascus Gate. The walls erected by crusaders had already tumbled by then, and at dusk, when the white stones caught the last sunrays, it must have looked to Polo as if the Holy City were still ringed by fire, the last embers burning from the Muslims' triumphant siege.

After extracting a princely sum from the Venetians, the Nuseibehs would have guided Polo and his party down the descending labyrinth of alleys to the Sepulcher. Early travelers warn of pickpockets infesting the bazaar, and Polo, blindfolded, must have felt that any bump or jostle was a thief trying to snip his purse strings. Quick-fingered thieves still abound, preying on distracted spiritual tourists. Church bells were outlawed, so Polo would have heard only the muezzin's call to prayer and, quite possibly, the hissing of wily merchants offering a splinter of the true Cross, or a piece of an apostle's kneecap. Trade in biblical forgeries was big business back then in Jerusalem, says archeologist Bahat, as it still is today.

Once Polo entered the arched doorway of the basilica, his Nuseibeh guide would have lifted aside the blindfold and led him to Christ's tomb. Then, as now, the Greek Orthodox monks were in possession of the Sepulcher. Today, they herd pilgrims in and out of the stone grotto like surly cattlemen. Polo would have had only a minute to grab his oil before he was yanked out.

Wajeeh helps manage the stampede. Even though he is paid only $5 a month by each of the seven sects, he takes his job seriously because of family duty, he says. The Nuseibehs once possessed vast olive groves; these were lost after the 1967 war when Israel conquered Jordanian territory. Wajeeh earns extra money as a tour guide. Some Nuseibehs are professors and businessmen, but it's Wajeeh's destiny, passed on by his father, to be custodian of the Holy Sepulcher. "Sometimes people yell at me: 'You're a Muslim. What are you doing here?' I tell them, 'We are not fanatics. We give respect to the Christians.'" And help bring peace to the Holy City.