2002.10.08, Dome of the Rock: Islamic Memorial Confirming Jewish Beit ha-Mi•qᵊdâshꞋ!!! – Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya, author of last year’s historical novel "The Rock: A Tale of Seventh-Century Jerusalem," told The [Jerusalem] Report, by phone from his home in Boston, that the current trend among Muslim clerics and politicians to deny the Jewish stake in the Mount "pulls the carpet out from under their own feet. It leaves them with a garbled nationalist version of history." One of Makiya’s book’s principal themes is that early Islamic sources leave no doubt that Mt. Moriah was chosen for the site of the Dome of the Rock because the Temple had stood there, not in spite of it.

menorah coin 696CE Islamic Umayyad Caliphate obverse	menorah coin 696CE Islamic Umayyad Caliphate reverse

menorah coin Islamic Umayyad Caliphate obverse	menorah coin Islamic Umayyad Caliphate reverse

Makiya elaborates: "There was a copper coin issued in 692, during the reign of the Caliph Abd al-Malik, who built the Dome. A Muslim coin, issued the year of the opening of the Dome of the Rock, and one side of it has a picture of a menorah! We know that Abd al-Malik was enamored of Solomon. And the Muslim claim to the Mount rested on the Jewish claim. Take for instance the earliest Muslim name for Jerusalem, ‘Madinat Beit al-Maqdis,’ city of the holy house," i.e. the Beit ha-Mi•qᵊdâshꞋ, or Temple, "later shortened to Al-Quds." (The Jerusalem Report, 2002.10.21, p. 41).