The Weight of the World

The 14-hectare platform atop the Temple Mount is so freighted with history and legend, it's a wonder the walls can bear the weight. Jews believe that at its center is the rock on which Abraham bound Isaac. Christians believe that at its southern end, Jesus overturned the tables of the money changers. And Muslims, who call it Haram al-Sharif (noble sanctuary), believe it is the site of Muhammad's Night Journey, recounted in the Koran, in which the Prophet ascended to heaven. But today this sacred place is battling simple gravity. A section of the Mount's eastern retaining wall — 40 sq m of teetering sandstone, pitted and creased by centuries of dusty desert wind — is bulging away from the great mass of the Temple. The darkness that lies behind it breaks black through a 50-cm crack that runs 20 m to the top. Looking up at the wall, it seems the sandstone slabs might topple at any moment.

That, indeed, is the fear of Israeli archaeologists. Since Solomon erected his temple on Mount Moriah in 960 B.C., it has been destroyed and sacked by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, Syria's Antiochus IV and two Roman Emperors. Each time it rose again, a symbol of the world's monotheistic religions. Now it is menaced by a different destroyer — the hatred between Palestinians and Israelis, for whom the old stones are nationalist territorial markers. Israelis say Palestinian reconstruction work inside the Temple Mount — begun in 1996 to turn massive underground chambers into a mosque — has compromised its structural integrity. The Palestinians insist the structure is safe, and accuse the Israelis of trying to assert control over the site. Both fear the loss of their political claim to the sacred place.

At the center of the current controversy is Isam Awwad, chief Palestinian architect for the Haram al-Sharif and the man in charge of the reconstruction within the Mount. He has long feared Israel would tunnel into the massive, unused chambers beneath the surface of the Mount. "I am an architect, but also I am a Palestinian who is part of this conflict," Awwad told Time. "So I made an initiative" to convert those chambers into mosques. In 1996, Awwad began renovating an underground hall called Solomon's Stables. The 4,000-sq-m hall was used by the Crusaders to stable their horses (it features in Dan Brown's best seller The Da Vinci Code as the place where the Knights Templars hatched their plots). When Awwad was done in early 2000, it was dubbed the Marwani Mosque.

Awwad hauled thousands of tons of rubble from a massive new entrance to the mosque. He claims he merely pulled out fill from an existing Crusader ramp, but Israeli [an error occurred while processing this directive] archaeologists — denied permission by the Muslim authorities, the Waqf, to supervise the excavation — fear systematic destruction of Jewish relics. The debris contained pottery shards dating to the time of Solomon's Temple, according to Israeli officials. "This isn't a political dispute. It's a cultural intifadeh," says Gabriel Barkay, an archaeologist at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv. Last week Barkay and other local archaeologists persuaded the Israeli High Court to temporarily bar the removal of any more debris.

Israelis say that since the reconstruction, a bulge in the Mount's southern wall has started to warp much faster, and a section of the eastern wall has begun to lean outward. "There's an immediate danger of collapse in the eastern and southern walls," says Shuka Dorfman, head of the Antiquities Authority. Awwad says a team of Jordanian experts is fixing the problem in the southern wall and will soon move onto the eastern wall. "My job is to keep and preserve, not to destroy and change the site," says Awwad. "I don't have anything to hide."

Israeli archaeologists want Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to force the Waqf to let them inside Solomon's Stable. Though he has stepped up restrictions on renovations, Sharon doesn't want to interfere, fearing a Muslim backlash. If the walls do collapse, Israeli officials worry they will be blamed, not the Waqf, which kept them out. That could lead to the very reprisals Sharon wants to avoid.