VERY QUIET JERUSALEM - While a bitter war rages less than 50 miles away, Christianity's holiest place has few visitors and just a handful of Easter pilgrims

 Inside Jerusalem's Old City there is a haunting absence, writes IRAM RAMZAN. While a bitter war rages less than 50 miles away, Christianity's holiest place has few visitors and just a handful of Easter pilgrims

In the Old City of Jerusalem there is a haunting absence in Christianity’s holiest place.

Shopkeepers and stallholders in the winding maze of narrow streets that make up the Via Dolorosa – the ‘Sorrowful Way’, along which Jesus is believed to have walked, bowed down by the weight of his cross – shake their heads and shrug their shoulders despairingly.

No heaving mass of tourists and just a handful of pilgrims are here this Eastertide. Business is bad. 

At the most sacred of all sites, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a vast complex which houses both the site of the Crucifixion and the Tomb of the Resurrection, where the faithful have come to weep and worship over 16 centuries, there are few visitors.

‘Last year there would have been 4,000-5,000 people here at the Church every day, it would have been so full,’ Brother Samir, a Coptic monk, tells me.

‘We feel so sad about it. We just want peace for everyone and between all countries. We will be happy again when there are more people here.’ For me, a secular Muslim visiting Jerusalem for the first time – in the solemnity of what is Holy Week for millions of Christians worldwide – is an emotional and thought-provoking experience.

Growing up, I was taught to revere Jesus or ‘Eesa’ as we know him. Koranic verses tell similar stories about him to those in the Bible – the Virgin Birth and his miracles. But Muslims believe Jesus was a prophet rather than the son of God, and that there was no crucifixion. Instead, Jesus was raised to heaven by God.

And of course Jerusalem is as important to Muslims as it is to Christians and Jews. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is but a few hundred metres from the al-Aqsa complex which contains the vast golden Dome of the Rock, the site where, in the seventh century, the Prophet Muhammad is believed to have flown to heaven on a winged horse to speak with God.

It shares that location with Temple Mount, which is sacred to Jews as the place that Abraham demonstrated his devotion to God by taking his son Isaac to be sacrificed. It is also the site of two ancient Jewish temples, with the Western (or Wailing) Wall the only remaining one.

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