[ml/nj]

The French photographer has, in fact, photographed mosques. The biggest of them is the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

The Dome of the Rock is not now, and never has been, a mosque.

Notice, too, the grass growing out of all the cracks in the pavement surrounding the Dome and the total absence of people in the pictures of it.

ML/NJ

[BlackVeil]

Wiki is not always a good source. I find this claim - also written elsewhere on the internet - that the Dome of the Rock is not a mosque but a shrine. That is an odd claim. It is obviously a shrine - to that rock which is deemed sacred - but it has all the facilities of a mosque, and people pray there. It seems like saying that Notre-Dame cathedral is a shrine to the Virgin Mary - and therefore not a church.

In the past, it was always called a mosque. St John Philby, and all those types of Arabists, often called it the mosque of Omar.

People hostile to the presence of the Dome of the Rock often call for "that mosque" to be taken down. One doesn't hear any calls for the destruction of "that shrine".

We find, in Crossovers: Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism by Shlomo Sharan, Dāwid Bûqay: "Abd al-Malik ... in 691 he built the mosque called the Dome of the Rock" (p 143)

And it has been called a mosque for centuries:

There is an often quoted statement of Muslim historian al-Muqaddasi on the reason for the building of Dome of the Rock. ...

O my little son, thou has no understanding. Verily al-Walid was right, and he was prompted to a worthy work. For he beheld Syria to be a country that had long been occupied by the Christians, and he noted there are beautiful churches still belonging to them ... So he sought to build for the Muslims a mosque that should be unique and a wonder to the world.