Islamic Conquest of Jerusalem

The event

The rapid military and political expansion of the new Islamic caliphate following the death of the prophet Muhammad in 632 brought vast, historically Christian territories in the Middle East and North Africa — including Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and eventually much of North Africa and Spain — under Islamic political rule within a few decades, one of the most consequential geopolitical transformations in the history of Christianity's ancient heartlands.

Jerusalem itself, after a siege, surrendered to the forces of the Caliph Umar around 637; according to widely repeated tradition, Umar personally entered the city, guaranteed safety and continued religious practice to its Christian population and clergy under the Patriarch Sophronius, and declined to pray inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to avoid it later being converted into a mosque — an episode often cited as reflecting comparatively tolerant early terms for Christian communities under Islamic rule, formalized in various regions through the evolving "dhimmi" status granting protected but subordinate legal standing to Christians and Jews.

The long-term consequences for Christianity were profound and complex: the ancient patriarchates of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria — previously central to the theological and institutional life of the early church — became minority Christian communities under Islamic political authority, a status many of their descendant communities (Coptic, Syriac, Melkite, and others) retain to the present day, while formerly vibrant Christian populations across North Africa largely disappeared over subsequent centuries through a combination of conversion, emigration, and demographic pressure.

The rise of Islamic power east and south of the Mediterranean also permanently altered the balance of the Christian world, shifting its institutional and demographic center of gravity increasingly toward Byzantine Constantinople and the Latin West, a realignment whose effects shaped medieval and later Christian history, including the eventual Crusades, for the following thousand years.

Other witnesses

• various early Islamic and Byzantine chronicle sources
• Sophronius of Jerusalem, surviving homilies referencing the conquest

Further reading

• Christian History Magazine 74: Christians and Muslims — free full issue
• Catholic Encyclopedia (1913): Jerusalem, AD 71-1099